I. Prologue

Having been chosen--whether as devil's advocate or sacrificial lamb, I am not  sure--to lead off this discussion on the question, "Was Civilization a  Mistake?", I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts. From the viewpoint of any non-civilized person, this consideration would appear  to be steeped in irony. Here we are, after all, some of the most civilized  people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized way imaginable whether  civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow civilians would likely  find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and pointless:  after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television  would relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild  foods? Nevertheless, despite the possibility that at least some of our remarks may be  ironic, disturbing, and pointless, here we are. Why? I can only speak for  myself. In my own intellectual development I have found that a critique of  civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons. The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern world.  We are, it seems, killing the planet. Revisionist "wise use" advocates tell us  there is nothing to worry about; dangers to the environment, they say, have been  wildly exaggerated. To me this is the most blatant form of wishful thinking. By  most estimates, the oceans are dying, the human population is expanding far  beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is  disappearing, and the global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability.  Unless drastic steps are taken, in fifty years the vast majority of the world's  population will likely be existing in conditions such that the lifestyle of  virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise by comparison. Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the  problems we face have to do with unique economic and historical circumstances.  But we should at least consider the possibility that our modern industrial  system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back quite far. This, at  any rate, is the implication of recent assessments of the ecological ruin left  in the wake of the Roman, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and other prior civilizations.  Are we perhaps repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale? If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its effects on  the environment, the second has to do with its impact on human beings. As  civilized people, we are also domesticated. We are to primitive peoples as cows  and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the rental property where I live in  California my landlord keeps two white domesticated ducks. These ducks have been  bred to have wings so small as to prevent them from flying. This is a  convenience for their keepers, but compared to wild ducks these are pitiful  creatures. Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too--though powerful  and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard  civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people appear to act as  though we were addicted to a powerful drug--a drug that comes in the forms of  money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without this  drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very  existence. Therefore we are easily manipulated--by desire (for more) or fear  (that what we have will be taken away)--and powerful commercial and political  interests have learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve  their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our  drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we  try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind. Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in its  present form, it follows that our descendants will be living very differently in  a few decades, whether their new way of life arises by conscious choice or by  default. If humankind is to 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? It is in this  constructive spirit that I offer the comments that follow.

II. Civilization and Primitivism
What Is Primitivism?

The image of a lost Golden Age of freedom and innocence is at the heart of all  the world's religions, is one of the most powerful themes in the history of  human thought, and is the earliest and most characteristic expression of  primitivism--the perennial belief in the necessity of a return to origins. As a philosophical idea, primitivism has had as its proponents Lao Tze,  Rousseau, and Thoreau, as well as most of the pre-Socratics, the medieval Jewish  and Christian theologians, and 19th- and 20th-century anarchist social  theorists, all of whom argued (on different bases and in different ways) the  superiority of a simple life close to nature. More recently, many  anthropologists have expressed admiration for the spiritual and material  advantages of the ways of life of the world's most "primitive" societies--the  surviving gathering-and-hunting peoples who now make up less than one hundredth  of one percent of the world's population. Meanwhile, as civilization approaches a crisis precipitated by overpopulation  and the destruction of the ecological integrity of the planet, primitivism has  enjoyed a popular resurgence, by way of increasing interest in shamanism, tribal  customs, herbalism, radical environmentalism, and natural foods. There is a  widespread (though by no means universally shared) sentiment that civilization  has gone too far in its domination of nature, and that in order to survive--or,  at least, to live with satisfaction--we must regain some of the spontaneity and  naturalness of our early ancestors. What Is Civilization? There are many possible definitions of the word civilization. Its  derivation--from civis, "town" or "city"--suggests that a minimum definition  would be, "urban culture." Civilization also seems to imply writing, division of  labor, agriculture, organized warfare, growth of population, and social  stratification. Yet the latest evidence calls into question the idea that these traits always go  together. For example, Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky's assessment of power  relations in the Mesopotamian city of Maskan-shapir (published in the April 1995  Scientific American) suggests that urban culture need not imply class divisions.  Their findings seem to show that civilization in its earliest phase was free of  these. Still, for the most part the history of civilization in the Near East,  the Far East, and Central America, is also the history of kingship, slavery,  conquest, agriculture, overpopulation, and environmental ruin. And these traits  continue in civilization's most recent phases--the industrial state and the  global market--though now the state itself takes the place of the king, and  slavery becomes wage labor and de facto colonialism administered through  multinational corporations. Meanwhile, the mechanization of production (which  began with agriculture) is overtaking nearly every avenue of human creativity,  population is skyrocketing, and organized warfare is resulting in unprecedented  levels of bloodshed. Perhaps, if some of these undesirable traits were absent from the very first  cities, I should focus my critique on "Empire Culture" instead of the broader  target of "civilization." However, given how little we still know about the  earliest urban centers of the Neolithic era, it is difficult as yet to draw a  clear distinction between the two terms.

III. Primitivism Versus Civilization
Wild Self/Domesticated Self

People are shaped from birth by their cultural surroundings and by their  interactions with the people closest to them. Civilization manipulates these  primary relationships in such a way as to domesticate the infant--that is, so as  to accustom it to life in a social structure one step removed from nature. The  actual process of domestication is describable as follows, using terms borrowed  from the object-relations school of psychology.  The infant lives entirely in the present moment in a state of pure trust and  guilelessness, deeply bonded with her mother. But as she grows, she discovers  that her mother is a separate entity with her own priorities and limits. The  infant's experience of relationship changes from one of spontaneous trust to one  that is suffused with need and longing. This creates a gap between Self and  Other in the consciousness of the child, who tries to fill this deepening rift  with transitional objects--initially, perhaps a teddy bear; later, addictions  and beliefs that serve to fill the psychic gap and thus provide a sense of  security. It is the powerful human need for transitional objects that drives  individuals in their search for property and power, and that generates  bureaucracies and technologies as people pool their efforts. This process does not occur in the same way in the case of primitive  childbearing, where the infant is treated with indulgence, is in constant  physical contact with a caregiver throughout infancy, and later undergoes rites  of passage. In primal cultures the need for transitional objects appears to be  minimized. Anthropological and psychological research converge to suggest that  many of civilized people's emotional ills come from our culture's abandonment of  natural childrearing methods and initiatory rites and its systematic  substitution of alienating pedagogical practices from crib through university. Health: Natural or Artificial? In terms of health and quality of life, civilization has been a mitigated  disaster. S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., et al., argued in The Paleolithic Prescription  (1988) that pre agricultural peoples enjoyed a generally healthy way of life,  and that cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, emphysema, hypertension, and  cirrhosis--which together lead to 75 percent of all mortality in industrialized  nations--are caused by our civilized lifestyles. In terms of diet and exercise,  preagricultural lifestyles showed a clear superiority to those of agricultural  and civilized peoples. Much-vaunted increases in longevity in civilized populations have resulted not  so much from wonder drugs, as merely from better sanitation--a corrective for  conditions created by the overcrowding of cities; and from reductions in infant  mortality. It is true that many lives have been spared by modern antibiotics.  Yet antibiotics also appear responsible for the evolution of resistant strains  of microbes, which health officials now fear could produce unprecedented  epidemics in the next century. The ancient practice of herbalism, evidence of which dates back at least 60,000  years, is practiced in instinctive fashion by all higher animals. Herbal  knowledge formed the basis of modern medicine and remains in many ways superior  to it. In countless instances, modern synthetic drugs have replaced herbs not  because they are more effective or safer, but because they are more profitable  to manufacture. Other forms of "natural" healing--massage, the "placebo effect," the use of  meditation and visualization--are also being shown effective. Medical doctors  Bernie Siegel and Deepak Chopra are critical of mechanized medicine and say that  the future of the healing professions lies in the direction of attitudinal and  natural therapies. Spirituality: Raw or Cooked? Spirituality means different things to different people--humility before a  higher power or powers; compassion for the suffering of others; obedience to a  lineage or tradition; a felt connection with the Earth or with Nature; evolution  toward "higher" states of consciousness; or the mystical experience of oneness  with all life or with God. With regard to each of these fundamental ways of  defining or experiencing the sacred, spontaneous spirituality seems to become  regimented, dogmatized, even militarized, with the growth of civilization. While  some of the founders of world religions were intuitive primitivists (Jesus, Lao  Tze, the Buddha), their followers have often fostered the growth of dominance  hierarchies. The picture is not always simple, though. The thoroughly civilized Roman  Catholic Church produced two of the West's great primitivists--St. Francis and  St. Clair; while the neo-shamanic, vegetarian, and herbalist movements of early  20th century Germany attracted arch-authoritarians Heinrich Himmler and Adolph  Hitler. Of course, Nazism's militarism and rigid dominator organization were  completely alien to primitive life, while St. Francis's and St. Clair's  voluntary poverty and treatment of animals as sacred were reminiscent of the  lifestyle and worldview of most gathering-and-hunting peoples. If Nazism was  atavistic, it was only highly selectively so. A consideration of these historical ironies is useful in helping us isolate the  essentials of true primitivist spirituality--which include spontaneity, mutual  aid, encouragement of natural diversity, love of nature, and compassion for  others. As spiritual teachers have always insisted, it is the spirit (or state  of consciousness) that is important, not the form (names, ideologies, and  techniques). While from the standpoint of Teilhard de Chardin's idea of  spiritual evolutionism, primitivist spirituality may initially appear  anti-evolutionary or regressive, the essentials we have cited are timeless and  trans-evolutionary--they are available at all stages, at all times, for all  people. It is when we cease to see civilization in terms of theories of cultural  evolution and see it merely as one of several possible forms of social  organization that we begin to understand why religion can be liberating,  enlightening, and empowering when it holds consistently to primitivist ideals;  or deadening and oppressive when it is co-opted to serve the interests of power. Economics: Free or Unaffordable? At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with one  another in the process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. In the most  primitive societies, these relations are direct and straightforward. Land,  shelter, and food are free. Everything is shared, there are no rich people or  poor people, and happiness has little to do with accumulating material  possessions. The primitive lives in relative abundance (all needs and wants are  easily met) and has plenty of leisure time. Civilization, in contrast, straddles two economic pillars--technological  innovation and the marketplace. "Technology" here includes everything from the  plow to the nuclear reactor--all are means to more efficiently extract energy  and resources from nature. But efficiency implies the reification of time, and  so civilization always brings with it a preoccupation with past and future;  eventually the present moment nearly vanishes from view. The elevation of  efficiency over other human values is epitomized in the factory--the automated  workplace--in which the worker becomes merely an appendage of the machine, a  slave to clocks and wages. The market is civilization's means of equating dissimilar things through a  medium of exchange. As we grow accustomed to valuing everything according to  money, we tend to lose a sense of the uniqueness of things. What, after all, is  an animal worth, or a mountain, or a redwood tree, or an hour of human life? The  market gives us a numerical answer based on scarcity and demand. To the degree  that we believe that such values have meaning, we live in a world that is  desacralized and desensitized, without heart or spirit. We can get some idea of ways out of our ecologically ruinous, humanly deadening  economic cage by examining not only primitive lifestyles, but the proposals of  economist E. F. Schumacher, the experiences of people in utopian communities in  which technology and money are marginalized, and the lives of individuals who  have adopted an attitude of voluntary simplicity. Government: Bottom Up or Top Down? In the most primitive human societies there are no leaders, bosses, politics,  laws, crime, or taxes. There is often little division of labor between women and  men, and where such division exists both gender's contributions are often valued  more or less equally. Probably as a result, many foraging peoples are relatively  peaceful (anthropologist Richard Lee found that "the !Kung [Bushmen of southern  Africa] hate fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid"). With agriculture usually come division of labor, increased sexual inequality,  and the beginnings of social hierarchy. Priests, kings, and organized,  impersonal warfare all seem to come together in one package. Eventually, laws  and borders define the creation of the fully fledged state. The state as a focus  of coercion and violence has reached its culmination in the 19th and 20th  centuries in colonialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Even the democratic industrial  state functions essentially as an instrument of multinational corporate-style  colonial oppression and domestic enslavement, its citizens merely being given  the choice between selected professional bureaucrats representing political  parties with slightly varying agendas for the advancement of corporate power. Beginning with William Godwin in the early 19th century, anarchist social  philosophers have offered a critical counterpoint to the increasingly radical  statism of most of the world's civilized political leaders. The core idea of  anarchism is that human beings are fundamentally sociable; left to themselves,  they tend to cooperate to their mutual benefit. There will always be exceptions,  but these are best dealt with informally and on an individual basis. Many  anarchists cite the Athenian polis, the "sections" in Paris during the French  Revolution, the New England town meetings of the 18th century, the popular  assemblies in Barcelona in the late 1930s, and the Paris general strike of 1968  as positive examples of anarchy in action. They point to the possibility of a  kind of social ecology, in which diversity and spontaneity are permitted to  flourish unhindered both in human affairs and in Nature. While critics continue to describe anarchism as a practical failure,  organizational and systems theorists Tom Peters and Peter Senge are advocating  the transformation of hierarchical, bureaucratized organizations into more  decentralized, autonomous, spontaneous ones. This transformation is presently  underway in--of all places--the very multinational corporations that form the  backbone of industrial civilization. Civilization and Nature Civilized people are accustomed to an anthropocentric view of the world. Our  interest in the environment is utilitarian: it is of value because it is of use  (or potential use) to human beings--if only as a place for camping and  recreation. Primitive peoples, in contrast, tended to see nature as intrinsically  meaningful. In many cultures prohibitions surrounded the overhunting of animals  or the felling of trees. The aboriginal peoples of Australia believed that their  primary purpose in the cosmic scheme of things was to take care of the land,  which meant performing ceremonies for the periodic renewal of plant and animal  species, and of the landscape itself. The difference in effects between the anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews  is incalculable. At present, we human beings--while considering ourselves the  most intelligent species on the planet--are engaged in the most unintelligent  enterprise imaginable: the destruction of our own natural life-support system.  We need here only mention matters such as the standard treatment of  factory-farmed domesticated food animals, the destruction of soils, the  pollution of air and water, and the extinctions of wild species, as these  horrors are well documented. It seems unlikely that these could ever have arisen  but for an entrenched and ever-deepening trend of thinking that separates  humanity from its natural context and denies inherent worth to non-human nature. The origin and growth of this tendency to treat nature as an object separate  from ourselves can be traced to the Neolithic revolution, and through the  various stages of civilization's intensification and growth. One can also trace  the countercurrent to this tendency from the primitivism of the early Taoists to  that of today's deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and bioregionalists. How We Compensate for Our Loss of Nature How do we make up for the loss of our primitive way of life? Psychotherapy,  exercise and diet programs, the vacation and entertainment industries, and  social welfare programs are necessitated by civilized, industrial lifestyles.  The cumulative cost of these compensatory efforts is vast; yet in many respects  they are only palliative. The medical community now tells us that our modern diet of low-fiber, high-fat  processed foods is disastrous to our health. But what exactly is the cost--in  terms of hospital stays, surgeries, premature deaths, etc.? A rough but  conservative estimate runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year in  North America alone. At the forefront of the "wellness" movement are advocates of natural foods,  exercise programs (including hiking and backpacking), herbalism, and other  therapies that aim specifically to bring overcivilized individuals back in touch  with the innate source of health within their own stressed and repressed bodies. Current approaches in psychology aim to retrieve lost portions of the primitive  psyche via "inner child" work, through which adults compensate for alienated  childhoods; or men's and women's vision quests, through which civilized people  seek to access the "wild man" or "wild woman" within. All of these physically, psychologically, and even spiritually-oriented efforts  are helpful antidotes for the distress of civilization. One must wonder,  however, whether it wouldn't be better simply to stop creating the problems that  these programs and therapies are intended to correct.

IV. Questions and Objections

Isn't civilization simply the inevitable expression of the evolutionary urge as  it is translated through human society? Isn't primitivism therefore regressive? We are accustomed to thinking of the history of Western civilization as an  inevitable evolutionary progression. But this implies that all the world's  peoples who didn't spontaneously develop civilizations of their own were less  highly evolved than ourselves, or simply "backward." Not all anthropologists who  have spent time with such peoples think this way. Indeed, according to the  cultural materialist school of thought, articulated primarily by Marvin Harris,  social change in the direction of technological innovation and social  stratification is fueled not so much by some innate evolutionary urge as by  crises brought on by overpopulation and resource exhaustion.  Wasn't primitive life terrible? Would we really want to go back to hunting and  gathering, living without modern comforts and conveniences? Putting an urban person in the wilderness without comforts and conveniences  would be as cruel as abandoning a domesticated pet by the roadside. Even if the  animal survived, it would be miserable. And we would probably be miserable too,  if the accouterments of civilization were abruptly withdrawn from us. Yet the  wild cousins of our hypothetical companion animal--whether a parrot, a canine,  or a feline--live quite happily away from houses and packaged pet food and  resist our efforts to capture and domesticate them, just as primitive peoples  live quite happily without civilization and often resist its imposition.  Clearly, animals (including people) can adapt either to wild or domesticated  ways of life over the course of several generations, while adult individuals  tend to be much less adaptable. In the view of many of its proponents,  primitivism implies a direction of social change over time, as opposed to an  instantaneous, all-or-nothing choice. We in the industrial world have gradually  accustomed ourselves to a way of life that appears to be leading toward a  universal biological holocaust. The question is, shall we choose to gradually  accustom ourselves to another way of life--one that more successfully integrates  human purposes with ecological imperatives--or shall we cling to our present  choices to the bitter end?  Obviously, we cannot turn back the clock. But we are at a point in history where  we not only can, but must pick and choose among all the present and past  elements of human culture to find those that are most humane and sustainable.  While the new culture we will create by doing so will not likely represent  simply an immediate return to wild food gathering, it could restore much of the  freedom, naturalness, and spontaneity that we have traded for civilization's  artifices, and it could include new versions of cultural forms with roots in  humanity's remotest past. We need not slavishly imitate the past; we might,  rather, be inspired by the best examples of human adaptation, past and present.  Instead of "going back," we should think of this process as "getting back on  track." Haven't we gained important knowledge and abilities through civilization?  Wouldn't renouncing these advances be stupid and short-sighted? If human beings are inherently mostly good, sociable, and creative, it is  inevitable that much of what we have done in the course of the development of  civilization should be worth keeping, even if the enterprise as a whole was  skewed. But how do we decide what to keep? Obviously, we must agree upon  criteria. I would suggest that our first criterion must be ecological  sustainability. What activities can be pursued across many generations with  minimal environmental damage? A second criterion might be, What sorts of  activities promote--rather than degrade--human dignity and freedom? If human beings are inherently good, then why did we make the "mistake" of  creating civilization? Aren't the two propositions (human beings are good,  civilization is bad) contradictory? Only if taken as absolutes. Human nature is malleable, its qualities changing  somewhat according to the natural and social environment. Moreover, humankind is  not a closed system. We exist within a natural world that is, on the whole,  "good," but that is subject to rare catastrophes. Perhaps the initial phases of  civilization were humanity's traumatized response to overwhelming global  cataclysms accompanying and following the end of the Pleistocene. Kingship and  warfare may have originated as survival strategies. Then, perhaps civilization  itself became a mechanism for re-traumatizing each new generation, thus  preserving and regenerating its own psycho-social basis. What practical suggestions for the future stem from primitivism? We cannot all  revert to gathering and hunting today because there are just too many of us. Can  primitivism offer a practical design for living? No philosophy or "-ism" is a magical formula for the solution of all human  problems. Primitivism doesn't offer easy answers, but it does suggest an  alternative direction or set of values. For many centuries, civilization has  been traveling in the direction of artificiality, control, and domination.  Primitivism tells us that there is an inherent limit to our continued movement  in that direction, and that at some point we must begin to choose to readapt  ourselves to nature. The point of a primitivist critique of civilization is not  necessarily to insist on an absolute rejection of every aspect of modern life,  but to assist in clarifying issues so that we can better understand the  tradeoffs we are making now, deepen the process of renegotiating our personal  bargains with nature, and thereby contribute to the reframing of our society's  collective covenants.

V. Some Concluding Thoughts

In any discussion of primitivism we must keep in mind civilization's "good"  face--the one characterized (in Lewis Mumford's words) by      the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of visual and      musical arts, the effort to widen the circle of communication and economic      intercourse far beyond the range of any local community: ultimately the      purpose to make available to all [people] the discoveries and inventions and      creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any      single group has discovered. Civilization brings not only comforts, but also the opportunity to think the  thoughts of Plato or Thoreau, to travel to distant places, and to live under the  protection of a legal system that guarantees certain rights. How could we deny  the worth of these things? Naturally, we would like to have it all; we would like to preserve  civilization's perceived benefits while restraining its destructiveness. But we  haven't found a way to do that yet. And it is unlikely that we will while we are  in denial about what we have left behind, and about the likely consequences of  what we are doing now. While I advocate taking a critical look at civilization, I am not suggesting  that we are now in position to render a final judgment on it. It is entirely  possible that we are standing on the threshold of a cultural transformation  toward a way of life characterized by relatively higher degrees of contentment,  creativity, justice, and sustainability than have been known in any human  society heretofore. If we are able to follow this transformation through, and if  we call the result "civilization," then we will surely be entitled to declare  civilization a resounding success.
 
 

(c) 1995 by Richard Heinberg The Author's website is at: http://www.dimensional.com/~ben/MuseIndex.html  MuseLetter is a monthly exploration of cultural renewal. Subscriptions: In the  U.S.: $15 per year; Canada and Mexico: $18US per year; elsewhere: $20US per yea.  Send check or international money order to: Richard Heinberg, 1433 Olivet Road,  Santa Rosa, CA 95401.