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Desmond posted:Yeah, but when you say things like primitivism doesn't take into account people like women, disability, children, etc. (closer community-based civilizations would do that, but that's a separate discussion), then you imply that primitivism is some plan that purposefully would deny certain groups. quote:Primitism is a viewpoint that could foresee how to adapt in a future world that has already been denied these things due to economical/ecological destruction.
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Jun 15, 2012 02:09
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Fatkraken posted:It's interesting/depressing that the only government to ever actually make a significant deliberate impact on population growth (as opposed to the typical levelling off that occurs as a country becomes richer) was China, with the oppressive one child policy*. Interestingly though it was still supported by over 75% of the population as of 2008. China did a very big publicity campaign with it and (rightly) pointed out that if the current population trend continued the amount of available farmland per person would shrink, leaving people exposed to famine and utterly reliant on imported food. It obviously resonated pretty well with the Chinese people. Fatkraken posted:Taking things on a slightly different tack, when agricultural output begins to be compromised for whatever reason, what would it take for the West (as a whole or as individuals) to substantially reduce their intake of meat? Something like 30% of the edible grains we produce go to livestock, between that and calorie-poor cash crops, agricultural output could probably fall 30-40% without having a major impact on human nurtition. Removing most of that livestock from the equation would give a lot of breathing room. This comes back to what actions are politically feasible, and this one is not. As people have mentioned, meat is a huge status symbol, delicious and well off people are used to it making up a huge part of their diets. Any politician who proposed legislating to cut back on meat production to free up more food for people would face riots from their citizens. Which brings us back to the main problem: Most people do not want to change their comfortable ways of life. Until we have a large number of people who are we are going to charge towards an ecological overshoot and come crashing back down to a sustainable level whether we like it or not. the kawaiiest posted:Eating meat makes me feel guilty as hell. I tried to be a vegetarian several times in the past but I never found vegetarian food to be particularly tasty or very filling. I'd either have a full meal and be hungry again in a couple of hours or be unable to finish my food because I didn't like how it tasted or the texture was weird... and then I'd be hungry again in a couple of hours. The smaller the animal, the more efficient it is at converting calories and water into muscle as a rule. I have an idea that goat is actually one of the best because they are smallish and eat a lot of stuff other animals won't plus they can live on steep terrain not suited to other forms of agriculture. I thought these are some interesting ideas, posted on another forum: quote:I concede to the latter point, especially with the fact that whoever comes after us will have to live with what we’ve done to the planet. If the goal of transition is to power down, decentralize and acclimatize to the new world, I think Heinberg says it best: “If humanity could choose its path deliberately, I believe that our deliberations should include a critique of civilization itself, such as we are undertaking here. The question implicit in such a critique is, what have we done poorly or thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now?” Certainly there are useful technologies that have emerged in the past few centuries, but what of their cultural and societal impacts? How do we determine what to keep? Can we safely “remove’ these ingrained ideals, such as the elevation of efficiency over human value (e.g: man as an appendage of the machine), the addiction of material (in the commercial, capitalist sense) desire, the overwhelming, ubiquitous understanding of life and nature through numerical, monetary value? Until this situation is remedied there can be no decisive action to stop or adapt to climate change and resource depletion.
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Jun 15, 2012 02:36
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the kawaiiest posted:No, I'm simply stating that it's not going to be any different or any better for these groups which I and my husband happen to be a part of, and therefore I don't endorse it any more than I endorse the way things are now. It's not that simple. It's like you think I have to pick a side and agree 100% with everything that they say. No, I can be right in the middle. I can say yeah, I'd love it if we could all live in Earthships and grow our own food, but I'd like there to be some infrastructure in place for things like health care. You are crazy if you think that our collision course with climate catastrophe is going to have any health care infrastructure in place to either deny or support in the first place. (You should read up on how more primitive societies take care of their family and friends though.) It's like we're on completely different wavelengths. It doesn't matter what you agree with or don't agree with, because unless some major technology comes about to save this earth from its self-destruction, our smug stances on the internet today are going to have absolutely no consequence on the reality of the future. Nobody in this thread has advocated this extreme anarcho-primitivist ideal that you and a few others are mistakenly understanding--it is impossible, negligent, and wrong to purposefully de-industrialize the world because there would be too much death. That's not the argument. The argument at least that I've understood in this thread is that if we can do it now, we should learn to develop agriculture and other adaptable technology (again, more "primitive" technology doesn't mean stupider technology) that can enable more people to survive by adaption and self-sustenance in the future. It's complete irony that the de-industrialization imagined by anarcho-primitivists may happen anyway, but not by them: by the consumerist population and industry, which pokes fun at simpler ways of life. And that's kind of the point of this thread: that unless we get a magical fix-it-all technology or two, we're on a course to self-destruction. What is there to do about it? It's not realistic to imagine we can always live in the comfort we do today. Also, I am still at a loss of why you think women and children would suffer more in a back to the basics lifestyle? I'm quoting this from wikipedia, but could probably find scholarly articles if you were interested; I just need to get some dinner now  quote:Anarcho-primitivists describe the rise of civilization as the shift over the past 10,000 years from an existence within and deeply connected to the web of life, to one psychologically separated from and attempting to control the rest of life. They state that prior to civilization there generally existed ample leisure time, considerable gender equality and social equality, a non-destructive and uncontrolling approach to the natural world, the absence of organized violence, no mediating or formal institutions, and strong health and robustness. Anarcho-primitivists state that civilization inaugurated mass warfare, the subjugation of women, population growth, busy work, concepts of property, entrenched hierarchies, as well as encouraging the spread of diseases. They claim that civilization begins with and relies on an enforced renunciation of instinctual freedom and that it is impossible to reform away such a renunciation.
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Jun 15, 2012 03:34
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4liters posted:Which brings us back to the main problem: Most people do not want to change their comfortable ways of life. Until we have a large number of people who are we are going to charge towards an ecological overshoot and come crashing back down to a sustainable level whether we like it or not. There are other issues. For health reasons, I tend to stick to a diet that primarily consists of meat, eggs, and cheese (when I'm not cheating). I'm reluctant to do a vegetarian diet because it is difficult to get enough daily calories without resorting to foods I consider inherently unhealthy. There are a significant number of people who follow this lifestyle at this point.
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Jun 15, 2012 03:37
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Desmond posted:Also, I am still at a loss of why you think women and children would suffer more in a back to the basics lifestyle? I'm quoting this from wikipedia, but could probably find scholarly articles if you were interested; I just need to get some dinner now Because of significantly higher rates of infant mortality and death during childbirth without proper medical treatment or food source stability. They would suffer much, much more under such a lifestyle than they do now. As would everyone else. However, I'm just confused as to why you think total societal collapse wouldn't be followed by, y'know, formation of new societies. Perhaps smaller-scale societies based on using what resources are locally available, but why would nothing at all form in the following vacuum? The Europeans didn't abandon society altogether after the Black Death rolled through again and again. It just seems far, far, far more intuitive to me that people would regress to the highest level of development they could manage, like say, a 19th century level of development. Assuming total societal collapse even happens.
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Jun 15, 2012 04:23
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Desmond posted:You should read up on how more primitive societies take care of their family and friends though. quote:It's complete irony that the de-industrialization imagined by anarcho-primitivists may happen anyway, but not by them: by the consumerist population and industry, which pokes fun at simpler ways of life. And that's kind of the point of this thread: that unless we get a magical fix-it-all technology or two, we're on a course to self-destruction. What is there to do about it? It's not realistic to imagine we can always live in the comfort we do today. Why is it so difficult for you to understand the concept of a middle ground? "I don't want to live without reliable health care" != "I mock all of those who don't share my way of life and refuse to change". Really? Just because I would like for everyone to have access to reliable health care doesn't mean I want to keep on living my comfortable first world life. I've said a number of times that if it weren't for my husband I'd have moved my rear end to an Earthship years ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one. The world is not black and white. quote:Also, I am still at a loss of why you think women and children would suffer more in a back to the basics lifestyle? I'm quoting this from wikipedia, but could probably find scholarly articles if you were interested; I just need to get some dinner now This is a pointless argument anyway since your primitivist utopia is about as likely to become a reality as Santa Claus. We're not going to hold hands, sing kumbaya and live in harmony with nature. We're going to do everything we can to rebuild our science labs and our hospitals, and thank gently caress for that.
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Jun 15, 2012 04:45
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Fly Molo posted:Because of significantly higher rates of infant mortality and death during childbirth without proper medical treatment or food source stability. They would suffer much, much more under such a lifestyle than they do now. As would everyone else. I didn't say new societies wouldn't form. What I said was that future societies won't have access to the modern healthcare we have today. That's just a guess though, since current healthcare is based upon large-scale pharmaceutical research and development, health care equipment, and other things that wouldn't be available in the scenario that primitivists often imagine if a large-scale collapse occurred. If that were the case, all humans might suffer more (not just women and children). My question was in response to why kawaiist said there would be certain groups within populations that would suffer more; I was just trying to understand why those groups would be singled out as opposed to everyone. On the other hand, we understand more about nutrition, medicine, and science today than did older civilizations, giving us a start. I'm trying to debate this in the context of what the turn of the century or later might look like in worst-case scenarios (i.e. industry continues expanding non-renewable use of energy, for instance, which it is). You can't compare such a grand-scale scenario with black death, sorry. Talk about a vacuum. Edit: nobody's talking about a utopia. Kawaiist, please read up on this subject in previous links/reading/books offered. You are speaking a different language that I can't reconcile with.
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Jun 15, 2012 04:48
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Desmond posted:Edit: nobody's talking about a utopia. Kawaiist, please read up on this subject in previous links/reading/books offered. You are speaking a different language that I can't reconcile with.  nevermind this whole discussion, you just don't get it.
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Jun 15, 2012 04:53
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the kawaiiest posted:
If you don't want to discuss, that's cool with me. I'll also take your insult with a grain of salt.
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Jun 15, 2012 04:57
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Desmond posted:Edit: nobody's talking about a utopia. Kawaiist, please read up on this subject in previous links/reading/books offered. You are speaking a different language that I can't reconcile with. quote:The infant mortality has simply been completely misrepresented, though. Yes, infant mortality among foragers is high–but not for the reasons such a statement would seem to imply. It is not because of disease or malnutrition–quite the opposite, as these things are fairly peculiar to civilized societies. Rather, just as we argue whether life begins at conception or at birth, foragers believe that life does not begin until, usually, the age of two. Foragers look at infanticide much the same way we do abortion. Among the !Kung, a pregnant woman goes into labor, and walks off into the bush (I’m told that childbirth is significantly less an ordeal among those who are not malnourished–affluently or otherwise). Maybe she comes back with a child; maybe she doesn’t. Either way, no questions are asked. So, our calculations of forager lifespans are quite unfair–if we’re going to include their infanticide, then we must include our own abortions. To do otherwise would simply be ethnocentric. In fact, when we do that, we see that forager lifespans are as long as, and sometimes longer, than our own. There's a whopping difference for women, one that isn't ethnocentric, between access to abortions as a method of birth control and popping a kid out and dumping it, and saying it's unfair to compare infant mortality because of access to abortions is ludicrous. The rest of your link was basically dogshit and with the worst font color/background color possible.
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Jun 15, 2012 05:18
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This is going to be an absurdly long reply, but I'd rather respond to everyone all at once.Dr. Gibletron posted:Your Sledgehammer, a lovely poster already mentioned some of the good ones. Derrick Jensen has written a number of anti-civ works including Endgame 1 and 2, A Language Older than Words, and The Culture of Make Believe. I haven't read any of his stuff yet, but from what I understand, he takes a more psychological approach and shows the sort of mental and emotional devastation that haunts the civilized. I'd also add that he advocates a more active form of resistance that I don't really subscribe to, but he has a number of fascinating ways of looking at the problems of civilization. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael trilogy, IMO, is the best introduction to the critique of civilization. The Ismael books are written in novel form and contain Socratic dialogues between the characters that paint a picture of Quinn's worldview. Quinn has a somewhat annoying habit of stopping short of the more radical implications of what he advocates, but in a way, that gives his readers some intellectual and emotional room to explore on their own. John Zerzan is basically the grandfather of the primitivist critique. His writings tend to have a more political bent and he, more than any other author I've read, seems to be really engaged in taking the cultural criticism as far as it can possibly go. I don't always agree, but I'm always impressed by his carefully constructed logic and the depth of his criticism. He takes a lot of flak for some of his more radical conclusions (I mean, hell, the guy calls symbolic thought into question), but I've found that his critics seem to coincidentally  overlook how academic and well-sourced his essays are.You've got folks like Chellis Glendenning and Fredy Perlman who promote explicitly noncivilized positions. There are also a wide range of environmentalist authors who arrive at what I'd term "primitivist" conclusions, among them Craig Dilworth, Richard Heinberg, Richard Manning, and Jared Diamond, as you mentioned. For understanding what noncivilized societies are actually like, modern anthropology is absolutely indispensable. Check out Marshall Sahlins or E.R. Sorensen. Colin Turnbull's book The Forest People is also outstanding. Here are some web resources I've found: The Dark Mountain Project - Lots of good essays here from a number of bloggers who explore the kind of thinking and feeling that goes along with the particular historical moment we find ourselves in. Dave Pollard's website contains his own chronicles and essays about exploring the collapse scenario we face and the noncivilized approach to life. The Anarchist Library has a number of good anti-civ writings from folks like Zerzan. Go to anti-civ under "Topics" and you'll find a huge number of essays. Ran Prieur's website is similar to Dave Pollard's and has a number of interesting essays. Mythodrome approaches primitivism from a religious/mythological perspective. Great stuff. Desmond linked to an article on The Anthropik Network earlier, and there's lots of good reading on there. I've had problems with dead links on there before, but a number of the essays are hosted elsewhere. ---------------- In a more general sense, though, you'll probably find that the new emotional avenues and out-of-the-box type thinking that a critique of civilization promotes will give you a new understanding of a wide range of things from all sorts of fields of study. At least, that's how it has affected me. From evolution to cosmology, a number of topics intersect with primitivism in interesting ways. I look back now and realize that for most of my life, I've come up to a few different intellectual boundaries, and primitivism was the missing puzzle piece. A character in one of Quinn's books tells another character that a deep enough understanding of the critique of civilization results in a mental shift where you become the primitivist message, and in your own personal understanding of it, you can bring it to bear on a number of other problems. I find primitivism reflected strongly in things like the political problem known as the Tragedy of the Commons, or the Mere Addition Paradox, an ethical dilemma formulated by Derek Parfit. One of Quinn's books contains an interesting version of the Prisoner's Dilemma the deals with cooperation and non-cooperation among noncivilized cultures. The spiritual approach to primitivism is best described by animism/pantheism, and animism is widely recognized as the "original" human religion. I've been pretty stunned to realize that there is a strong animistic/pantheistic/primitivist vein running through most modern religions. I personally rejected Christianity long ago for atheism, but I've recently been re-reading the Bible from a primitivist viewpoint, and the resonance is amazing. An itinerant preacher named Ched Meyers has explored this in a few essays that you can find online. Just look at the Garden of Eden story, which posits agriculture as a curse for the sin humans committed when they attempted to gain godlike knowledge. That story is traditionally understood as meaning that humanity is somehow inherently flawed or "fallen," but I think a closer reading reveals that there is some mysterious, implicit understanding that "God" (an animistic/pantheistic "force of nature") created things in such a way that civilization from its very birth sows the seeds of it's own destruction via ecological devastation (more on this later). Civilization is a non-starter due to the way humans evolved, and more generally, due to the way ecologies maintain balance. 10,000 years is the blink of an eye in geologic time, and it has taken civilization a mere 10,000 years to get to the point of complete ecological collapse. "God" spends the rest of the Old Testament repeatedly attempting to destroy civilization, and it's always through natural means - flooding, plagues, meteor showers, so on and so forth. It's no coincidence that agriculture and its accoutrements - things like complex irrigation systems, monocropping, and the centralized cities that result from agricultural settlements - strongly contribute to or directly cause things like desertification, flooding, and plagues. There's a deep synthesis here that stretches from religion to science to politics and everything in between for people who are willing to earnestly and open-mindedly poke around. Before I move on to another response, I'd like to throw out this little bit from Matthew that is such an explicit and neat summation of primitivism that it almost makes me laugh: Matthew 6:25-30 posted:“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ------------------ Execu-speak posted:I think in the future our society right now is going to be viewed as criminal for what it has done. I agree, and I hope that it will prevent future generations from repeating our mistakes. r.y.f.s.o. posted:I would kind of like to go back to feeling like our animal natures have not already doomed us. eh4 posted:Humanity as a whole is a blind, non-evolving and incompatible part of any ecosystem it touches. This kind of thought process deeply frustrates me, because it isn't true. Humanity lived sustainably for millions of years, long enough for evolution to act strongly on us. A tiny portion of humanity still lives this way, and such a lifestyle still works. Human nature in and of itself is not flawed. It is only comparatively recently and only among civilized humans that we have become "an incompatible part of the ecosystem." A common rebuttal to my argument is to go on about megafauna extinction at the end of the Pleistocene as some sort of counter to the idea that humans can ever live in harmony with nature, but that rebuttal is flawed in a few different ways. For one, there is strong evidence to suggest that the megafauna extinctions weren't caused solely by humans. The deeper point, though, is that extinction is part of the game of life. Sometimes new organisms arise or already existing organisms move to other areas and in doing so outcompete or prey on other organisms which eventually go extinct. It happens routinely, and it is a perfectly natural process. There is an enormous difference between the extinction of a few species of megafauna and complete ecological collapse. Humans of all kinds may cause the former, but only humans living a very particular lifestyle have caused the latter. V. Illych L. posted:I'm saying that the political economy of material production will always favour civilisation. It did thousands of years ago, and it would again, even if all civilisation was burned to the ground (which I find seriously hard to imagine even in the very worst case of complete desertification and nuclear war, not with our extremely efficient means of storing information). An agricultural or pastoral society will always be better able to feed itself (speaking purely from calories harvested) than a hunter-gatherer society, and thus marginalise the hunter-gatherers. I pretty much agree with you on this point, and this above all other reasons is why civilization has spread across the entire Earth. I'd quibble with you on your statement that agricultural societies are better able to feed themselves than hunter-gatherers - it's more that agricultural societies are better able to produce more people than hunter-gatherers. I think that most anthropologists would back me up on this point. In fact, agriculture allows for unchecked population growth via the way it creates food. The unchecked population growth allowed by the birth of agriculture has a number of historical consequences. To feed the increased population but still have some food left over to store, an agricultural society must put more land under tillage, which will put them in direct conflict with neighbors. Hunter-gatherer neighbors stand no chance, because they are not able to produce the primary resource that wins wars - soldiers - in high quantities. Human history reveals a long process of noncivilized peoples being completely destroyed by civilized cultures. This will to repress or eradicate the noncivilized is disturbingly echoed in Dusz's sentiments from earlier. More importantly for our current times, though, the unchecked population growth caused by agriculture always results in ecological collapse. It doesn't matter what species or method, any life strategy that allows a population to surpass natural ecological limits (most pointedly, the natural limit caused by the relationship between predator and prey populations) will always approach the final, deadly limit of ecological collapse. If ants had adopted a life strategy that allowed for unchecked growth, the results would be the same as what humans are currently facing. Agriculture has resulted in the metastasization of the entire ecosystem. My biggest opposition to civilization is that it is simply non-functional. It just doesn't work; the result is always collapse. History supports this claim. What's that little aphorism about insanity? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? the kawaiiest posted:It's easy to fantasize about this stuff when you're a healthy dude, but if you have health complications or disabilities, or if you are a woman, there's nothing comforting or good about this whole idea at all. Fatkraken posted:And remember that "so a few newborns might die" is not the end of it. In regions without access to any substantial medical intervention, women die in childbirth in huge numbers. Afghanistan is a good model because there is a lot of data because of the war, and a lot of variation in the availability of trained aid. I'll get to some general thoughts about people with disabilities, women, etc. in noncivilized societies, but I want to address Fatkraken's point about childbirth first. You are committing an enormous fallacy here. You're comparing modern industrial civilizations to less developed and/or historical civilizations. Noncivilized societies are nothing like civilizations with low tech bases, and when folks in this thread attempt to make points about hunter-gatherer societies by comparing them to "less developed" civilized societies, they are using flawed reasoning. There is strong evidence to suggest that childbirth in hunter-gatherer societies is easy and relatively painless due to their greater overall health. I will gladly provide as many sources as you feel necessary to convince you of this point. To get back to kawaiiest's concern about the disabled and women, I'll echo what Desmond is saying and again caution everyone involved in this discussion about projecting civilized biases onto the noncivilized. I understand your concerns, kawaiiest, and I sympathize with them. My grandmother had COPD and would not have lived nearly as long as she did without oxygen treatment. However, I'd argue that many of the worst diseases and disabilities that many of us in the developed world suffer from - heart disease, obesity, COPD, cancer, mental health problems - are a direct result of our civilized lifestyles. It's also important to note that a lack of modern, industrialized medicine does not mean no medicine at all. The noncivilized have notions of healthcare and its importance in human life. They don't abandon the disabled or elderly to die of exposure, even during tough times. Here's an interesting article on this very subject that I think you will find fascinating. Women are not oppressed in noncivilized cultures; they are frequently given equal standing or greater standing than the men in their societies. You also don't see women pumping out 5 or 6 babies during their lifetime in noncivilized societies, because they have notions of birth control as well, just ones that don't resemble ours. There is strong evidence to suggest that repression of women is an artifact of civilization. I posted about this subject earlier, and included some links to further information. I'll gladly provide more sources if people would like to see more. I'd encourage anyone to do a quick Google search and see what you come up with; I think you'll be surprised. Fatkraken posted:There is no period in human or even hominid history where we have consistently been nice to one another all the time. Our ancestors may well have wiped out entire subspecies of human. I agree with the first part, but be careful in what you are assuming about the interaction between Neanderthals and other early humans. 1-4% of the genome of modern Eurasian people comes from Neanderthals. With significant interbreeding between Neanderthals and other early humans, what we commonly see as "extinction" may actually be more accurately called "hybridization." Speciation is a pretty blurry boundary as it is, and speciation among early humans even more so. The reason why Neanderthals "disappeared" may well be that along with other early types of humans, they became us. If two slightly different populations of canines interbreed and eventually completely intermix into a third, hybridized population, does that mean that the first two populations went extinct? It certainly stretches the common meaning of the word. ------------------ To tie a nice little bow on this, I'll concede that I sometimes get frustrated when having this kind of discussion, because I'm swimming against the tide. Civilized culture tells us a number of convenient lies about the noncivilized. When people talk about the noncivilized (and I'm not singling out anyone here, but talking in general), they frequently bring to the table a large number of culturally biased assumptions that are demonstrably false upon close inspection. I understand how easy it is to slip into those cultural biases, because I do it all the time. The time has come now, though, with the crisis we face, to question those biases and call out the flaws. Anthropology is a relatively new academic pursuit, and it is really the first discipline to attempt to put aside biases and try to understand the noncivilized on their own terms. It just makes sense that the best way to understand the feelings, thoughts, and lifestyles of the noncivilized, from women to men to children to the elderly, is to just ask them about it and watch how they live their lives. They are just as human as you and I, and they deserve just as much respect and dignity as you and I do. The conclusions that anthropologists reach are frequently deeply surprising and humbling, and I'd encourage everyone here to do a little reading about anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers. To be convincing, though, the primitivist argument has to do more than just point out the flaws of civilization - it also has to point out the benefits of a "primitive" lifestyle, and that's hard, because there's the immediate feeling that we'd be giving up so much. I'll again offer this question to chew on, though - is there any real difference between human happiness and the fulfillment of human instincts? The most deeply held desire of everyone in this thread - social acceptance and love - was in place and provided for from the dawn of the human species. I think that agriculture and its products move us further away from those things, not closer. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Jun 15, 2012 |
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Jun 15, 2012 05:27
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Zachack posted:I read the link you posted. It said the following: You must be talking about the link I posted three pages ago debunking the genocide thing? Yes, terrible background, I agree. I haven't read that whole page and was not basing any current discussion on health care based on anything else that page or site had to say. It just seemed to offer a summary of why primitivsts weren't advocating genocide. Might as well reference it from their mouths not mine, because I am not a primitivist. I have only read at length some posts and references in this thread, along with some Quinn books. There are a ton of other links in this thread to look at, and plenty of book recommendations. Now we are on a new discussion about health care. The only link I posted regarding this discussion was a brief wiki reference, and I had a caveat that there was probably more reliable discussion on it elsewhere, but I didn't have time to look at the moment. When asking specifically about why certain groups would be more affected, it was not an attack, but a genuine curiosity. What I'm getting in return is I should have a love-in and drink coke 
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Jun 15, 2012 05:42
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Desmond posted:I didn't say new societies wouldn't form. What I said was that future societies won't have access to the modern healthcare we have today. That's just a guess though, since current healthcare is based upon large-scale pharmaceutical research and development, health care equipment, and other things that wouldn't be available in the scenario that primitivists often imagine if a large-scale collapse occurred. If that were the case, all humans might suffer more (not just women and children). My question was in response to why kawaiist said there would be certain groups within populations that would suffer more; I was just trying to understand why those groups would be singled out as opposed to everyone. On the other hand, we understand more about nutrition, medicine, and science today than did older civilizations, giving us a start. Of course, even if a total societal collapse occurred (a very big if), why would people choose primitivism over forming a less-developed society? Even if oil disappeared overnight, why wouldn't people be interested in banding together in something resembling, say, a 19th century level of development? Perhaps not mass production of antibiotics on an industrial, national scale, but small-scale production from sample of penicillin. People are going to strive for a higher level of technological development, not say "gently caress civilization it always collapses" and give up entirely. Primitivism entails genocide, it's just genocide by means of neglect. "Your Sledgehammer posted:My biggest opposition to civilization is that it is simply non-functional. It just doesn't work; the result is always collapse. History supports this claim. What's that little aphorism about insanity? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Everything ends. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile for as long as it lasts. History also supports the claim that people like civilization, they like not having a significant percentage of their babies die before growing up, they like having a stable food supply. From where I'm sitting, primitivism just seems like a selfish philosophy. gently caress the weak, gently caress the disabled, gently caress women and children and everyone too weak to fend for themselves. It seems like a philosophy devoid of compassion, borne only from nihilism and perceived inevitability.
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Jun 15, 2012 05:51
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Fly Molo posted:Everything ends. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile for as long as it lasts. History also supports the claim that people like civilization, they like not having a significant percentage of their babies die before growing up, they like having a stable food supply. From where I'm sitting, primitivism just seems like a selfish philosophy. gently caress the weak, gently caress the disabled, gently caress women and children and everyone too weak to fend for themselves. It seems like a philosophy devoid of compassion, borne only from nihilism and perceived inevitability. Did you read any of the rest of my post, or just the part you quoted?
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Jun 15, 2012 05:57
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Fly Molo posted:Of course, even if a total societal collapse occurred (a very big if), why would people choose primitivism over forming a less-developed society? Even if oil disappeared overnight, why wouldn't people be interested in banding together in something resembling, say, a 19th century level of development? Perhaps not mass production of antibiotics on an industrial, national scale, but small-scale production from sample of penicillin. People are going to strive for a higher level of technological development, not say "gently caress civilization it always collapses" and give up entirely. Primitivism entails genocide, it's just genocide by means of neglect. Sure, it would be pretty drat awesome to strive for good human health care. Oh, and you're now moving on to the whole genocide thing, which has already been debunked in this thread. So I'm not going there. You could say our current system is genocide by neglect since we're not really taking care of our resources in such a way to continue to support the planet's people.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:06
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Desmond posted:When asking specifically about why certain groups would be more affected, it was not an attack, but a genuine curiosity. What I'm getting in return is I should have a love-in and drink coke I can't really speak to anarcho-primtivism (the phrase itself is suspect, by the way, because it seemingly unironically adopts racist-imperialist rhetoric as part of its title). But the reason people who are disabled, or women, or young would suffer is that new cultures don't spontaneously generate from the ether. The "collapse" (if it ever happens, and if it's recognizable as such) will inevitably retain the vestiges of our current culture (note the ghosts of Rome next time you go to D.C., or speak our language). The only thing stopping this industrialized, technologically modern culture from murdering black people and the disabled is a strong and robust state. And even then, it's not doing a very good job. As you yourself point out a genocide by neglect is happening currently. I see no reason why a collapse would erase these historic imbalances, and every reason why it would exacerbate them. In short: there's a reason that "survivalists" are almost always bourgeois western white men whose only disability is a lack of humanity. (Are there any non-white anarcho-primitivist theorists?) It's because they stand to gain the most from fewer social pressures to not rape and murder. My family is similar to theKawaiiest's, and they're really the ones I worry about when all these wet dreams about the new agrarian culture come up.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:29
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Your Sledgehammer posted:My biggest opposition to civilization is that it is simply non-functional. It just doesn't work; the result is always collapse. History supports this claim. What's that little aphorism about insanity? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? My biggest opposition to life is that it is simply non-functional. It just doesn't work; the result is always death. History supports this claim.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:43
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deptstoremook posted:In short: there's a reason that "survivalists" are almost always bourgeois western white men whose only disability is a lack of humanity. (Are there any non-white anarcho-primitivist theorists?) It's because they stand to gain the most from fewer social pressures to not rape and murder. My family is similar to theKawaiiest's, and they're really the ones I worry about when all these wet dreams about the new agrarian culture come up. Yep, those white western primitivists like Zerzan sure display a stunning anti-community "survivalist"-style lack of humanity as well as a strong desire to rape, murder, and pillage.  I agree that the term "primitivism" is pejorative, but it is the term most frequently used by the culture at large, and it pretty well gets across what is being advocated by folks like me. I certainly don't see indigenous cultures as "primitive;" in fact, I think they're actually way ahead of us in terms of lifestyle. Disagreement is fine, but I'd really appreciate it if people would stop putting words in my mouth or making assumptions about the position I am taking.
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Jun 15, 2012 06:56
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deptstoremook posted:In short: there's a reason that "survivalists" are almost always bourgeois western white men whose only disability is a lack of humanity. (Are there any non-white anarcho-primitivist theorists?) This is a really weird non sequitur dude, survivalists and anarcho-primitivists are very different groups who have almost no views in common. Not least because the former are generally extreme rightists and the latter generally extreme leftists.
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Jun 15, 2012 07:09
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Disagreement is fine, but I'd really appreciate it if people would stop putting words in my mouth or making assumptions about the position I am taking. Anyone turning this worldview around into something it's not by saying people like me do not care about women, infants, society, etc., and grossly comparing similar views to genocide is just so out there it is hard to get riled up about it because it makes absolutely no sense and is just wrong. Same thing with the "oh you silly tree-hugger" spiel, which is just an echo-chamber of platitudes when you can't think on your own.
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Jun 15, 2012 07:53
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I would recommend people read Nothing To Envy. It gives a rather harrowing description of how things changed for North Koreans in the face of famine. In a collapse future, regardless of what form civilization/society takes, any humans alive will need to eat. When the alternatives are death by starvation or anything else, every single rule is amenable to be broken to avoid death by starvation. I don't think we'll find ourselves in a future where suddenly and permanently there's not enough food - it'll be gradual but noticeable, but certainly one of the earliest effects of a collapsing global distribution system and climate change. You won't have gangs of people with guns protecting large resources of food (think Mad Max or Waterworld), it'll be groups of people with a bit more, but everyone with not really enough. As it worsens, we'll all eventually be in the same bucket. You can't have big brutal wars when everyone is malnourished - you'd probably be better off sacrificing your warriors and eating them instead. Food will be on everyone's agenda. All the other stuff that'll come about (treatment of women etc etc) will play second fiddle to the search for food. In light of that, I think one of the best ways to change the future is to plant long lived food plants (suitable to future climates) that will either survive or seed surviving offspring. Additionally, you should also pull up concrete and bitumen etc now, while we've got the energy and tools. I say these are the best options because it's a certainty that if you don't plant food plants, none will be growing in the future, but if you do, some might survive; it's also a certainty that nothing will grow on concrete, but something might eventually grow in the dirt underneath if you remove the concrete. Derrick Jensen says in one of his talks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9os1GFuWJ0) that our descendents will judge us on the water and food sources available to them, and I agree. If you don't have those things, utterly everything else becomes irrelevant. We can make changes in the present that will improve the chances of those things being available in future, regardless of what the world becomes.
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Jun 15, 2012 13:32
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Disagreement is fine, but I'd really appreciate it if people would stop putting words in my mouth or making assumptions about the position I am taking. Most are never going to stop misinterpreting what you've said, and putting words into your mouth. From almost a decade of discussing this stuff with people, I know that a large majority of people simply can't wrap their head around any "primitivist" concepts, and merely understand it as "living in the forest, digging up tubers with your bare hands for food, living in the stone age." Like it's merely being ultra-Amish or something. That's because these people see the only difference between civilized and non civilized peoples as being technology and material wealth. Anybody who can't get past that roadblock will never be able to grasp what you're actually saying, and it's simply foolish to engage with them.
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Jun 15, 2012 13:44
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ANIME AKBAR posted:Most are never going to stop misinterpreting what you've said, and putting words into your mouth. From almost a decade of discussing this stuff with people, I know that a large majority of people simply can't wrap their head around any "primitivist" concepts, and merely understand it as "living in the forest, digging up tubers with your bare hands for food, living in the stone age." Like it's merely being ultra-Amish or something. That's because these people see the only difference between civilized and non civilized peoples as being technology and material wealth. Anybody who can't get past that roadblock will never be able to grasp what you're actually saying, and it's simply foolish to engage with them.
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Jun 15, 2012 14:14
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Sledgehammer, Desmond, troika: my post is definitely not a good description of any primtivism; I was more generally trying to describe why I feel that the collapse of the status quo would cause especial harm to the people who already have least. I was more empathizing with theKawaiiest, and thinking about my own underprivileged family. For any theorization of the future to be legitimate, I feel that it would need to demonstrate how these Others would be cared for (even at the expense of the bourgeoisie who do the theorizing, and would have the best time during the "collapse").
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Jun 15, 2012 16:25
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I have a question. What, exactly, do people see happening as a result of global warming? I'm confused when one of the responses to "a collapse of civilization would necessitate that the majority of the Earth's population no longer exist" is that either a massive die-off and/or collapse of civilization is inevitable. I can see regional climates changing, making some land less suitable for farming and other land more suitable for farming. Changing where we grow our food would be extremely costly, and could have serious negative effects on global food supply, but I still have a hard time seeing it as a civilization killer. Same with other potential effects like rising sea levels, disrupted water supply, or political instability. Again, really bad, really costly, would certainly result in deaths especially for the poor. Even in a worst case scenario it seems unlikely that these combine effects would kill as many people as a transition to a non-civilized society. Global warming has the potential to be really, really bad and we should devote way more resources than we currently do to stop it. But at the same time, this seems like a solution worse than almost any potential problem created by global warming.
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Jun 15, 2012 17:09
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Inaction Jackson posted:Even in a worst case scenario it seems unlikely that these combine effects would kill as many people as a transition to a non-civilized society. People are not saying the transition would or should be voluntary, but that it would be an unavoidable PRODUCT of the above instabilities. And that's because in an increasingly complex and interdependent world, fairly small disruptions in the supply chains can have major knock on effects which cause disruptions which seem completely out of proportion with the apparent trigger. The population in many regions has overshot what could be supported using only local labour, land and materials, so if global supply chains are disrupted even slightly it would have huge knock on effects, which themselves have knock on effects and so on.
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Jun 15, 2012 17:20
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I think the main thing is that most of the currently arable land will become non-arable. The entire US, Africa, and most of Europe will become non-arable. The largest arable land area will probably be in Siberia, Canada, and Northern Europe. Also consider how much of the earth's landmasses are concentrated by the equator and how little land there is especially south of the equator (name as many cold places south of the equator as you can). This will have happened by 2100 or maybe earlier by a lot of predictions. This alone would cause massive problems within society. It wouldn't be a smooth shift with no wars, starvation, and a lot of people dying. Then the "feedback loops" that could happen as a result (like methane being released from the seafloor) might make it become way worse than this even further on. I'm partially in denial if only because I don't know how accurately we can really predict such a complicated model. On one hand I feel that as long as the climate changes gradually enough that we can see it as a real problem but still have time to do something about it there might be some kind of technological out. If the changes are too fast or the small changes destabilize civilization too much too early then maybe the worst-case scenarios people are talking about here will indeed happen. I don't see any solution to global warming in the next twenty years, but provided the current trend of technological advancement is able to continue without global-warming influenced societal collapse, then predicting what technology might be able to remedy 80 years from now is really hard to say at this point in time. I feel like every generation always sees the immediate future as "the end times" or on the verge of imminent collapse. It is still possible that everyone who previously thought that was wrong, but if civilization is destined to collapse there has to be one generation that thinks that it will happen and then it actually does. Again I admit this may be a form of denial. I am expecting the worst but hoping for the best. Practically I don't see what can be done. If anything the current trend of governments not being able to reign in consumption is the biggest threat. I honestly think that if the US government (as an example) were able to force a drastic change in the way of living that people would just adapt and be happy with it. We don't need cars, we just think we do. I'm hoping that as the effects of global warming become more obvious that the governments of the world can just force people to give things up. Democracy and grassroots activism really isn't going to work here... we need a bad guy to force us to behave. It's probably too late to stop catastrophic warming, but cutting emissions significantly and forcing people to adapt to the catastrophe in a way that can maintain civilization seems like the best route.
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Jun 15, 2012 17:43
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systran posted:I think the main thing is that most of the currently arable land will become non-arable.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:01
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Fatkraken posted:People are not saying the transition would or should be voluntary, but that it would be an unavoidable PRODUCT of the above instabilities.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:13
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Desmond posted:I have to agree with this. I'm not speaking for anyone but me here, but here's the way I think. I'm leaning toward the idea of living according to more primitive ideas and have been slowly shedding my upper-middle-class status quo upbringing in the last several years. This is MY personal decision and reflects the way I live, think, and act. This evolving change is a result of anthropological studies and degree and current study/research on a nearby temperate rainforest where I live--this education has shown me that "simpler" ways of life worked in the past and continue to do so. Related to this growing education and a more primitivist way of life (if you want to call it that) is being concerned about the shape of our planet as the climate varies due to anthropogenic climate change. So, trust me when I say I care about not just the environment but for humanity--the two are related too much to not care about both. Can I ask how you've been accomplishing your transition? It's an idea I've been considering.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:36
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Truthfully, I don't think it'll be a civilization killer either. I think it'll be enough to collapse many modern nation states, allowing smaller ones to rise out of their rubble where civilization will still be intact. Surrounding these will be more and more rural areas with isolated, agrarian economies with limited trade with the now much diminished but still extant urban centers. This, indeed, will be plenty bad. But I don't see total civilization collapse, it'll shamble on, regrow and head towards the next collapse in the cycle. I guess my thinking is centered around collapse of other large nation states from history, particularly in times when nation states had much more independent economies. The Mauryan empire covered most of the Indian subcontinent, and once it was fully collapsed there were still many villages with isolated economies throughout India, and then another empire based in the same center as the Mauryan empire, but with a much diminished range. I feel like thats how its going to be. International trade will break down, and economies will become more localized, meaning more people will be driven into rural areas which will grow in number to support a less dynamic urban center. I don't think that the argument that civilization is unsustainable necessarilly means that we'll ever get to a point where we exist without civilization. It will continue to be dynamically unstable and collapse from time to time, but that doesn't mean it'll disappear.
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Jun 15, 2012 18:44
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deptstoremook posted:Sledgehammer, Desmond, troika: my post is definitely not a good description of any primtivism; I was more generally trying to describe why I feel that the collapse of the status quo would cause especial harm to the people who already have least. I was more empathizing with theKawaiiest, and thinking about my own underprivileged family. Someone mentioned anecdotal "evidence" of Brazilians they met who wished for modern health care. The primitivist viewpoint is that without introduction to outsiders, would they have the diseases that they do or the poor living conditions that may be due to outsiders coming in and burning down their rainforests or polluting their water resources, taking away their way of life? I don't know the whole situation, but all things must be taken into consideration, not the least of which is the underlying fact that earlier cultures had no frame of reference from their lifestyle to larger modern societies and health care. And once they are assimilated, the damage is done and therefore to deal with outside disease/lack of resources, that is when they start needing health care. Need I remind anyone of the awfulness of Europeans in assimilating native Americans? Same thing happened in Canada. Abuses took place. Disease was introduced. Water supplies were polluted. Land was taken. Children in Canada were taken out of their homes and put into residential schools. Right now several First Nations living in what has been dubbed the Great Bear Rainforest (critical habitat with rare species, and also a home to some of the world's largest salmon-bearing rivers) will most likely have their homes threatened by supertankers and oil spills because they still don't really seem to have complete rights to their original way of life and land as they should. Outsiders have completely ruined some of these First Nations' lives, to the point that yes, they currently do need modernized form of health care. They would have rather been left alone. I've been around many and canoed with them, have been invited to great feasts. I've attende many rallies where they are protesting fish farms, oil sands pipelines, etc. I've met an elder woman who has cancer,who lives in a town near the Athabasca oil sands, a town which has had a 40% increase in cancer since the oil sands have been operating. She told her story in tears saying it was too late to go back to the old ways. Ridiculous. As far as how the disabled, the old, the young, the woman will be taken care of without modern health care? Humans are going to be how they've always been, where you'll see some have compassion and some don't--those who have compassion will take care of those around them. Modern health care has its praises sung here in this thread, but the truth is that many many are denied health care even in the supposed strongest country in the world, while many more are taken care of in those terrible socialist countries (like my own :smug). The point is, there is no guarantee to anything in this world. There are some interesting reports on egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer societies: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways-three-complementary http://uncgsoc101.wordpress.com/module-8-gender-stratification/part-2/
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Jun 15, 2012 19:47
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Winter Rose posted:Can I ask how you've been accomplishing your transition? It's an idea I've been considering. It is only a transition. The reason I said I am not a primitivist earlier is because it would be entirely hypocritical of me to say so while I type on the internet while sitting in a comfortable house. By comfortable, I don't mean fancy or too big or anything; the house is older but does have a yard where I can grow vegetables. Already I'm luckier than the majority of the world's population, not trying to brag but just saying that in much of the Americas this is true, that we have it way better than the majority of the world in terms of having essentials met: shelter, clean drinking water, food, etc. The changes I've made aren't truly primitivist as they are just reducing the footprint: walking, taking public transit, growing at least the veggies we eat, buying used clothes instead of new ones, hand-making Christmas presents, not buying products made in sweat shops, not eating food made in factory farms, recycling, composting with the city, buying bulk, etc. We also keep our heat very low in the winter and instead just layer clothing. I think our visitors hate us then. There is something to be said for flannel robes and blankets. There's plenty of DIY projects in our home too; instead of buying something we like to make our own things. I would love to make a bigger transition and move to the country, have my own chickens, grow our own food completely, and so on, but reality is such that we'd have to travel too far to jobs or have to quit said jobs without being able to afford such an initial investment. I sometimes envision this scenario, with extended family/friends around. Then there's convincing the other half  Even that wouldn't be like a hunter-gatherer society though.e: I think the biggest change is the worldview and mindset which leads to understanding the truly valuable stuff in life (not material possessions but relationships, to not take more than is needed), etc. Jenny of Oldstones fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jun 15, 2012 |
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Jun 15, 2012 20:10
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Why would any energy company ask for opinions from the people living on the planet they're loving over? http://arcticready.com/social/gallery
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Jun 16, 2012 23:28
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Loving Life Partner posted:Why would any energy company ask for opinions from the people living on the planet they're loving over? It's fake.
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Jun 16, 2012 23:29
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Damnit, Internet!!! 
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Jun 16, 2012 23:34
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It's a pretty obvious fake, too. I mean, really, "Thanks to @Shell, I'll be swimming until I die of starvation?"
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Jun 17, 2012 00:20
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The concerns about “primitivist” notions (or uncivilized, noncivilized, indigenous – whatever you want to call it) from folks like deptstoremook, the kawaiiest, and Fatkraken are easy to grasp. The people here who are advocating a primitivist critique – myself, Desmond, etc. – would be naïve, self-important douchebags not to understand and sympathize. As Desmond and I have both alluded to, the concerns that have been voiced affect us personally, too. I do not mean to come across as harsh or unsympathetic, and I’d like to personally offer an apology for the glib sarcasm in my response to you, deptstoremook. It was both unwarranted and inconsiderate. The reason for my frustration is that I feel that many of you are disagreeing with things that I’m actually not advocating at all. The cultural critique and new (old?) cultural vision I am advocating is both intricate and total. It is very easy to misunderstand or overlook some of the details. The most commonplace way that this happens is when people look at less developed civilized cultures and use those to make assumptions about the noncivilized. It is easy to understand why people fall into this trap, but that doesn’t make it any less misguided and wrong. Nearly every noncivilized culture that has ever existed has had some sort of contact with the civilized. The results of such contact are nearly always deeply destructive and irreversible. Even minor contact results in a type of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual collapse of the noncivilized culture. The anthropologist E. R. Sorensen experienced this himself on one of his studies, and he offers a vivid firsthand account. It is an ugly and disturbing process. Out of the cultural void, the civilized mindset springs up almost magically fully-formed, with all of its attendant maladies and misery (Again, I urge you to read the Sorensen article. He describes the birth of “economic” notions, the civilized idea that there are “right and wrong” lifestyle choices such as what to wear, etc. Here's another Sorensen article that explores it.). In a nutshell, this is why you should never base your opinion of the noncivilized on less developed civilized cultures. I am basing my opinions on cultures that have completely rejected agriculture and animal domestication, and those cultures alone. The approach I am advocating is noncivilized lifestyle in its purest form – immediate return hunter-gatherer societies. The type of cultural collapse I’ve described explains why the remaining “uncontacted” tribes often display such fierce resistance and violence towards contact attempts. It often takes anthropologists decades to gain the trust of uncontacted peoples. We project civilized biases onto the noncivilized and assume that the reason they react violently is due to an inherent lust for bloody combat (the kind of “winner take all” mentality we see in civilized warfare and market economies) or some perverse desire for fresh human sacrifices to their violent, chaotic nature gods. Anthropology exposes those assumptions as falsehoods. No, the reason they react violently to contact is that they have witnessed the “progress” of civilization at a distance, and they want nothing to do with it. They have an implicit understanding of the human misery and devastation that goes along with the civilized lifestyle, and they want to avoid it at all costs. I for one salute them, and I feel profound admiration for their ability to resist empire. Most of them are also lucky in that their homes are “marginal” lands that are unsuitable for agriculture – jungles, deserts, and islands. I know what you are thinking – that my ideas drip with the worst kind of “Noble Savage” wankery, and that I have a naïve understanding of human nature. I will address this later, but for now I’d like to further elaborate on the concerns that have been voiced about the elderly and disabled. If you’d like to read what I have to say about the “Noble Savage,” skip down to the marked passage that is later in my post.*** I can paint a broad picture of the way the elderly and disabled are cared for in immediate return societies. It’s an outline, and a deep anthropological study would probably show minor variations among individual tribes. I am basing this outline (as well as the rest of my post) on a wide range of things I have read, snippets from here, there, and everywhere. For those who may not be fully convinced and would like to know more, I strongly urge you to dig around in a library or on the Internet; focus your study on the anthropology of hunter-gatherers. My lack of sourcing will probably be seen by some of you as a cop-out, and for that, even though it’d be enormously time-consuming, I’ll offer to dig up all the various sources I used to reach this understanding; just ask. Considering the formal rules of debate, it’s only fair to offer. The elderly are treated with deep respect, and their wisdom is taken very seriously by the tribe at large. Due to their long life, they have knowledge of things that may otherwise be forgotten, like where to find food and water in unlooked-for places when times are tough. The elderly are fully integrated into society and treated with just as much respect and dignity as everyone else, if not more so. Same goes for the disabled. They frequently become the spiritual guide of the tribe, which reflects both an understanding that people who are not able-bodied and have more time to think than others can come up with unique and creative solutions to problems, as well as a desire to assign them a productive role so that they may fully participate in the society. They are given opportunities to participate in the day-to-day life of the tribe to the fullest of their abilities, and they are treated with the same respect and love as everyone else. Their lives may end up being shorter than their peers, but they pass on knowing that they were loved and cherished by their community. Gone, but not forgotten. This outline becomes unclear when it comes to the profoundly disabled, people that wouldn’t be able to live without catastrophic intervention. I’d point out that many scenarios that necessitate catastrophic intervention in our society – things like heart attack, stroke, etc – are a direct result of our civilized lifestyle. In a tribal society, if a mother knows that her baby is so disabled that it is unlikely to survive for very long, the result is probably infanticide, where the mother would just abandon the baby away from the camp to die of exposure. The first reaction here is to recoil in horror, but you must understand the why and the subjective feelings of those involved to get a real grasp of this. There’s a tragic practicality here – if the child is unlikely to live for very long, then it is pointless and even wasteful to attempt catastrophic intervention of some kind. I think there is also the implicit understanding that even if the child lives, it will suffer enormously for the rest of its life. There is also the understanding that there must necessarily be some sort of self-limiting approach to population lest everyone suffer. Mothers who are compelled to commit infanticide do so with deep grief and a heavy heart. It haunts many of them for the rest of their lives. It’s something that they have to do, not something that they want to do. Compare this sort of lifestyle to what happens in even the most highly developed civilized cultures. The elderly are marginalized, shut away in nursing homes, and forgotten. Their knowledge and life experience go to waste, and their waning years are frequently profoundly lonely and idle. The disabled are shunned and/or approached with a sense of embarrassment. I like to think I’m a pretty caring person, but I’ll freely admit that I am guilty of this. When I see someone in a wheelchair, I find it hard to talk to them in a way that preserves their dignity. I’m always afraid that I’ll unintentionally say something offensive, or that by asking to help them, I’ll inadvertently give them the impression that I feel that they are less than me (which isn’t the case). It’s easiest just to ignore them. It’s tragic, and I should be loving ashamed. I could go on and on here. Disabled people have trouble getting jobs. The mentally retarded are shunted away into “alternate” classrooms that are nearly universally understaffed. The picture that emerges is one where the “less able-bodied” – the elderly, the disabled, the mentally retarded – are treated as second-class citizens, whether unintentionally or not. Our society is structured in a way that prevents them from fully participating. The most social interaction that most elderly and heavily disabled folks get is through the deep love and selflessness of their immediate families. There is also something worth pointing out about life-saving medical procedures. Nearly all of them involve deep indignity – being poked, prodded, various foreign bodies being inserted into yours. Tubes stuck down your throat or up your rear end, your chest being opened up by a machine. People elect to be put on ventilators or hooked up to various machines out of the quixotic desire for just a little more life, even if its one whose quality is profoundly reduced. We react in horror when we see our beloved family members in hospital beds, their bodies filled with tubes that run to all sorts of complicated machinery. We think quietly to ourselves that we’ll never elect for that later on in life, but when the time comes, we change our minds. It is an easy to understand and sympathize with, as well as deeply human reaction to the fear of death, but it comes with a number of unintended consequences. The deep sense of horror and various deranged reactions that surrounded the Terry Schiavo case are entirely applicable here. Please do not misunderstand me. I’m not trying to be judge, jury, and executioner for other people. Such an attitude is profoundly evil and would rightly be called so by anyone in this thread. I’m not saying we should take people off life support or cut benefits to the disabled. That kind of reaction would be deeply inhuman. I won’t judge folks who elect for life-saving procedures; in fact, I’d honestly probably do the same myself if I were in their position. For those of you who are concerned about how people with my worldview will react towards the disabled in a potential collapse scenario, I’ll offer this, which is what I would do in a position of political power – I would immediately begin stockpiling our dwindling resources to ease the poor, disenfranchised, elderly, and disabled through a collapse. If the electrical system shuts down, shunt all remaining power to the hospitals. Conserve and stockpile gas so that medicine gets to pharmacies and organ transplants get to operating rooms. It’s the most sympathetic, caring, and human response, and I think most of us would do the same. The simple and painful truth is that is never, ever going to happen. My best advice for the disabled/elderly/poor in a collapse scenario is to seek support in your communities, among the people who know you and love you. It’s the best way to ease through the transition. Likewise, able-bodied people should seek out opportunities to aid people who are less fortunate in their communities. Looking for a large-scale political solution in the crisis we are facing is foolish. People will rarely give up things to help a complete stranger. And it’s not really out of a sense of malice, just a part of our human nature. Remember, due to our tribal evolution, we can typically only see about 150 people at a time as fully human. Tribal societies work within this limitation; civilized societies try to thwart it and then have the gall and arrogance to be surprised when it doesn’t work out well. Our society is unintentionally structured in such a way that prevents a lot of good behavior. We are told over and over to eat right, get exercise, be nice to others, and help the poor. We fail at these things not out of laziness or malice, but because it is nigh impossible to do so consistently in civilized society. Our cities promote sedentism. Live in the burbs, sit in a car seat for 2 hours on the way to work, sit in an office chair, then go home and sit in front of the television. I could come up with numerous examples here. There’s a quiet desperation and suffering among even the most developed countries. Look all around you, and you will see it. The depression and isolation of the obese in a society that shuns them while it promotes unhealthy behavior. The seeming lack of sympathy among people at the top of even small companies, who, with even a moderate employee base, will be incapable of treating those they don’t know as humans instead of numbers or cogs in a machine. People toil away at unsatisfying jobs for 8 hours a day, their only escape being the idle chit-chat at the water cooler, a chance to joke around and play with their fellow coworkers. ***Compare all of that to noncivilized societies, and the difference is profound and overwhelming. The concept of “work” is foreign to them; even gathering and hunting food is a playlike activity. Everyone gets a say. People are treated with respect, love, and dignity. Their lifestyle is inherently healthy. It’s not so much that these cultures act in a way that is somehow superhuman or thwarts basic human nature – people still get pissed, disagreements take place, war exists, and though it is extraordinarily rare, every now and then someone murders another person in their tribe. The difference that I am driving at is that noncivilized societies implicitly account for human nature and are able, through the way their societies are structured, to capitalize on its most noble aspects while downplaying its worst ones – even war (more on this in a moment). Hunter-gatherer societies are custom-made by nature to fit humans best, across all levels of human experience – physical, mental, and emotional. It’s the kind of society we evolved in, and though we civilized folks are 10,000 years down the road, we haven’t changed much at all. Civilization, on the other hand, attempts to “perfect” human nature, to transform humans into some kind of completely benevolent, all-knowing, all-controlling gods, who are able to “manage” the ecosystem without destroying it. The fact that civilized cultures are confused and disappointed when this attempted transformation doesn’t work out reflects a deep cultural blindness. Again, I’ll be glad to provide the numerous sources I’ve looked at to come to this conclusion, though I’d encourage people to explore for themselves; it’s more meaningful that way. This civilized cultural blindness is perhaps most profoundly reflected in how we think noncivilized cultures handle war. We think that civilized war is just like noncivilized war, but that is false. Noncivilized warfare is constant and low-level, an attempt to enforce territory. A raid happens, a few people die, and then you raid them back, without any attempt to destroy or assimilate. One of the unintended but natural outcomes is population limitation that preserves ecological balance. The behavior between neighboring tribes is intricate and complex, and is best described by the game theory notion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, or the term “frenemies.” Neighboring tribes fight, but they also trade between one another in a form of gift economy as well as have giant celebrations together (frequently to “make up” for combat) where they play matchmaker in order to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding. Civilized warfare, due to the resource strain caused by agriculture that I described in an earlier post, most often takes the form of total annihilation. One culture attempts to completely destroy the other and assimilate the survivors (usually just the women and children) in order to gain more resources. In the modern world of nation-states, we’ve managed to mostly do away with the civilized wartime tendency towards total annihilation (though it still occasionally and disturbingly crops up, a la the Holocaust), though we still fight over resources, and we’re still bound by the territory enforcement and basic revenge motives inherent to human nature that we see in the noncivilized. The difference is that we now possess weapons that can level entire cities and snuff out millions of lives in an instant. I’ve tried to keep this post calm and rational, but it’s really hard to shy away from more literary allusions and metaphors because this problem is just as much spiritual and emotional as it is physical and intellectual. You want to know what civilization is? Here’s what civilization is – a machine. It churns forward, eating up the Earth and turning out flashy technology and human misery as its products. We’re all caught up in it, cogs in its wheels, and at its unfeeling machine heart is an inhuman void. Pieces are flying off the machine, little wheels and pumps, and it’s beginning to groan under its own weight, yet it still plods forward. There’s the growing feeling among the people caught up in the gears, but suppressed, denied, and ignored by the people at the controls who reap the most benefits, that the machine is about to finally break down and collapse. The most ironic part of this tragedy is that the building of the machine was unintentional. I don’t know what caused ancient humans to take up agriculture; despite some remnant archaeological evidence, we can really only imagine. The picture that I intuit is one of a few isolated tribes – one near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one near the Yangtze, others elsewhere – each reacting to something that we would term a “natural disaster” – maybe a flood in one case, a volcanic eruption in another, or some general climatological shift. Their tribes nearly destroyed, their people starving, they decided to move from some mild horticultural tendencies to full-blown agriculture as a hedge against further suffering. They didn’t have any clue of what would result – the alienation from other animals and plants, their brothers and sisters in the community of life; the immediate negative health effects; the fact that the grain stored in their granaries would produce a ruling class; the depletion and eventual desertification of the soil. They were just human beings having a very human reaction to crisis. They soon outgrew their own landbase, and as they continued to move forward, the cost of turning away from agriculture stacked higher. They couldn’t stop practicing agriculture lest many starve. Numerous opportunities throughout history have presented themselves to begin to turn away from our destructive lifestyle and move back towards something that worked – the collapse of the Roman empire, the end of various Chinese dynasties, the Black Death, 60’s counterculture, so on and so forth – but we failed to do so because we didn’t fully understand the problem. A handful of isolated individuals, now venerated as spiritual leaders – folks like Moses, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Mohammed – began to wrangle at the edges of the problem and see civilization/empire for what it truly is. Though their own understandings of the problem were often confused or incomplete, I am consistently astounded by the depth of their vision and their implicit understanding of the far-reaching consequences of the civilized mindset. There are incredible similarities among what those guys were saying, and the general picture that emerges – simple lifestyles are more enlightened, love your neighbor, the meek shall inherit the Earth, heaven is right here on this planet for those willing to look, vague notions that everything is interconnected and aware/talk of reincarnation (bedrocks of animism/pantheism), etc. – all point strongly to an animistic/pantheistic/primitivist lifestyle and mindset that our ancestors experienced every day of their lives. History marched on, though. The teachings of those spiritual leaders were absorbed by civilization, further misunderstood and confused, and finally institutionalized into religions that promote further repression and violence (once again, I could go on and on here – the breathtaking violence of Islamic fundamentalism, the systematic repression of women by the Catholic church, on and on ad infinitum). Could society have ever transformed though the radical implications of the teachings (and their vaguely primitivist notions) of those spiritual leaders? Who knows. History is full of little incidents and accidents, intentional and unintentional, that forever change its course. I can think of one such instance in the life of Jesus that changed everything. Jesus’s message was mostly one of total nonviolence. He was just a dude who began to understand how bad it is inside the machine, and he pushed people, particularly the disenfranchised, to abandon it. One time, though, he got really loving pissed, yelled at some people, and turned over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple (money and its trappings are among the worst and most inhuman products of civilization). In that instant, in the eyes of the elite at the top of the empire he condemned, his message transformed from one of passive revolution and resistance to one of active revolution. One small moment, but from that point forward, his murder at the hands of the ruling class was inevitable. That murder, along with a few isolated mentions that he is a son of “God” (the universal, animating force that we are all sons and daughters of) have elevated him to the status of godhood for many people. It’s something that I don’t think he intended (though I’m obviously just guessing). Our culture has diluted his teachings so much that they are well-worn and toothless, their radical implications routinely misinterpreted or ignored (Give all your money to the poor! If that’s not radical, then what is?). We’ve seen other leaders and historical figures who had things to say about the inherent worth and dignity of all humans, and who advocated a cultural transformation, though not necessarily a primitivist one. Think Ghandi, JFK, MLK. All of them, murdered. How much higher will the stack of bodies have to be before you “civilized” people understand the kind of misery you are perpetrating, however well-intentioned? But still, history marches on. We’re now staring down a looming ecological collapse. People either don’t know what we’re facing or are completely unwilling to confront it and talk about it. Our society promotes short-term thinking over long-term thinking, but a good deal of this problem has to do with the fact that civilization is not molded well to fit basic human nature and behavior. People on this forum love to point out the stunning denial and magical thinking that is present in most right-wing political thought, but it is just as evident in left-wing political thought for those willing to look. The point I keep making about food storage producing hierarchy is exactly why communism’s legacy is one of failure. The leaders of communist countries see that their communist utopia is not working out and resort to repression or genocide to try to get their subjects to fit the mold. The most current failure of left-wing thought can be seen in all the proposed technofixes for the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Space escapism, nuclear energy, green technology, and so on and so forth are all proposed solutions that categorically fail to consider how we got here. Our problem is a lifestyle that is fundamentally unfit for humans as well as the surrounding environment, and a consequent massive population overshoot that resulted from this problematic mode of living. Proposed solutions like space technology or green technology will only succeed in kicking the can further down the road and dooming future generations to an even more costly disaster. A few folks in this thread have either directly or implicitly asked for me to describe the collapse itself, or what a post-collapse world will look like. I’m just flabbergasted, stunned, and frustrated by that response, as if I’m all-knowing or possess some sort of secret knowledge. I have no idea how the collapse will play out. I also can’t and won’t tell people how to live their lives. All I am trying to do is pass on the way I have begun thinking and feeling, and hopefully some people will listen. When it comes to the ecological crisis, though, including climate change, I’m certain that absolutely nothing will be done. The few climatologists and liberals who are loving terrified will continue to be angrily shouted down or ignored, just as they always have been. Average, everyday people will go on about their lives in quiet denial, with a growing subconscious feeling that something is profoundly wrong. The understanding is too limited. The monied interests are too powerful. Nothing will be done. When it gets so outrageous and so obvious that people can’t ignore it, that’s when we’ll spring into action, but by then it will be far too late. In fact, it’s already too late – the permafrost is melting, and an extinction event on the order of magnitude of asteroid collision has already happened. We’re in an extended Wile E. Coyote moment that may go on for decades. We’ve already plunged off the cliff, but we’re pinwheeling out into thin air because we refuse to look down. It took me years to get to the viewpoint that I currently find myself looking at things from. All these problems, all the many little ethical and intellectual dilemmas we bump into, are tiny little pieces in a large mosaic, but you have to back far enough away from civilized culture to really see it. It’s not easy, and it’s definitely a process at an individual level. It’s an ongoing process for me. I feel like a cultural refugee, straddling the fence between the civilized and noncivilized. I’ll never be the same, but I can’t talk about it in polite society. I’m a pretty normal dude, and I do pretty normal things. I pay my bills, work a full time job, go out with friends for drinks on weekends, flirt with cute girls at work, on and on. I love my family. I want to be a good person and I try to seek out the inherent goodness in others. I can’t talk about what I know, though, because the reaction among trusted friends and family is frequently bewilderment, and the reaction among mere acquaintances (who I never talk to about this stuff) would likely be social shunning if not outright hostility. That’s why I post in this thread. Though the reaction to a “primitivist” critique is still almost always reflexive dismissal (as ANIME AKBAR points out), climate change is such a big piece of the mosaic that maybe, just maybe, I can get a number of people in here to step back and really look. As Yiggy talks about, the coming ecological collapse may not get rid of civilization. I just want people to know that civilization is not the only option. The alternative lifestyle to civilization is not a nightmarish existence – quite the contrary. The noncivilized lifestyle recognizes quality over quantity. I’d rather have 40 or 50 awesome years than 80 so-so or miserable ones. The noncivilized lifestyle has a deep understanding that life may not always be “fair” in the eyes of humans, but there is always some sort of purpose or reason for what happens, so they take it in stride. They understand that they are not in control of the Earth, will never be in control of the Earth, and should not be in control of the Earth. They recognize their place among the rest of the community of life – animals are their brothers and sisters who give them life. They known that they, too, as much as any animal, owe a life debt to the ecosystem at large that will be paid in full when they die, their life force subsumed by the Earth and returned in the form of new plants, animals, and humans to further the game of life. They look around themselves and see overwhelming abundance, a lush green Earth teeming with a veritable smorgasbord of unique lifeforms. How could they not be happy, and how could they not see “God” or “the forces of nature” as fundamentally aware and benevolent, even though they do not always favor humans? They know that life and the universe have given them an extraordinary gift, and it is one that civilized people spit on and reject as “inferior.”
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Jun 17, 2012 04:22
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No poo poo people look at your ideas as destructive and recoil in horror: your ideology will kill billions of people and leave the rest of us as little more than apes without the chance at meaningful lives. It sounds like you want to just give up and resign yourself to live in some tribal hut, but the reality is we've far gone past that point, and we're likely to join the ranks of the extinct if we just pretend technology is nothing but danger. Even beyond that, you really think the resistance to this idea is limited to a bunch of posters calling you dumb? Try actually attempting this and being at the receiving end of a bullet the moment anyone with real power sees what you're trying to do. People are not and will not be willing to give up basic modern conveniences that they literally require to survive. Exurbs connected by nothing more than roadways are destructive. McMansions are destructive. Having generous green lawns in the middle of the loving desert is destructive. Your solution to this is to give up everything we're used to without even bothering to find a reasonable way to live with roughly the same standard of living, and go back to living in huts as hunters and gatherers or, if we're lucky, subsistence farmers (never mind that our technology has done a great deal to make these lifestyles no longer possible given our environmental abuses). That is tantamount to genocide in this era. Perhaps you should give up the noble savage concept and realize that human life before modern technology was awfully lovely, and that, despite some of our more disgusting excesses, technology has greatly improved our lives and has the potential to make things more sustainable if managed properly. Because the alternative is giving up and letting us die a slow and painful death in a world we can no longer survive. Somebody fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jun 17, 2012 |
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Jun 17, 2012 06:29
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Wow, way to quote a really well written and thought out and long essay without understanding a bit of it, and then giving a knee-jerk and angry reaction. There's absolutely no incitement to anger in any of the postings about primitivism at all. It's telling to see how badly people react to philosophical ideas and to ways that others personally decide to view the world and to live. Nobody's tying you to the whipping post to agree with them or asking you to change. I always thought D&D was pretty civilized. Edit: maybe anger isn't the best way to describe it, but lack of comprehension and accusations/misjudgment? Read the thread. Genocide has already been brought up before; you are not adding anything new here that hasn't already been discussed and walked away from. Further, it's grossly negligent of you to accuse any other poster of wanting genocide to actually happen (unless they do, which would be evil and awful, but that's not the case here). I hesitate to contribute to ongoing debate about hunter-gatherers (maybe an anthropological thread would invite serious debate about it rather than this crap). Anyone truly wanting to discuss more, feel free to PM me. Anyway, a contribution about Canada and climate change/pollution/funding: Canada always seems environmentally good, right? Not really so in the current Harper administration. There's quite a bit of discussion of it in the Canadian thread. We just got the Fossil Award, and a big bill just got passed that slashes a lot of environmental and scientific funding. http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/world/2012/06/14/are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-scientist?page=0,0 There's also a huge controversy here about introducing supertankers to a coastal area of the Great Bear Rainforest, the world's largest intact temporal rainforest, not to mention piping both heavy oil sands oil through parts of the forest as well as condensate. Expansion of Alberta's mining/injection is also contributing more CO2 emissions (from well to wheel) than lightweight oil drilling, and there is quite a bit of expansion of it at the moment thanks to short-term thought rather than long-term thought. It is amazing to me that this is going on when a good part of the rest of the world is really starting to step up in climate talks. I mean, our prime minister doesn't believe in climate change and is a young earth creationist. 
Jenny of Oldstones fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Jun 17, 2012 |
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Jun 17, 2012 07:04
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