Extolling the Human Scale in the Dao De Jing

Here are two passages from the Dao De Jing that summarize the importance of the human scale, which is characterized by insularity and rejection of high technology. Let them serve as an epigraph for my post on the Islamic State and the human scale.

The more taboos and inhibitions there are in the world,
The poorer the people become.
The sharper the weapons the people possess,
The greater confusion reigns in the realm.

The more clever and crafty the men,
The oftener strange things happen.
The more articulate the laws and ordinances,
The more robbers and thieves arise.

--Dao De Jing, Chapter 57

 

Ah, for a small country with a small population! Though there are highly efficient mechanical contrivances, the people have no use for them. Let them mind death and refrain from migrating to distant places. Boats and carriages, weapons and armour there may still be, but there are no occasions for using or displaying them. Let the people revert to communication by knotting cords. See to it that they are contented with their food, pleased with clothing, satisfied with their houses, and inured to their simply ways of living. Though there may be another country in the neighbourhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic between them, and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other.

--Dao De Jing, Chapter 80 (transl. John C. H. Wu)

 

 

On Defining the Natural

Of central importance to anarcho-primitivist and Daoist thought is the concept of nature. Without the distinction between, say, technology, progress, civilization, and domestication on the one hand, and a notion of an unmanipulated, pristine natural state on the other, an anti-civilization critique becomes impossible. Both sides know this all too well, and both continue to commit much energy to either elucidate or discredit this idea of nature. The resulting contest is predictable and tired: anti-civilization folks stressing the unnatural suffering and ruin inflicted by civilization, post-modernist defenders of civilization insisting that any distinction between nature and civilization is delusion. It is therefore understandable that AP thinkers spend much of their time dragging out evidence that demonstrates how civilization and nature are at odds--the entire plausibility of the AP critique would seem to hinge on there really being such a thing as a "state of nature".

Unfortunately, that ideological position is fraught with issues. And it really is ideological--little or no scientific evidence actually supports the notion of a static state anywhere in the "natural" world. Species come in and out of existence with or without the meddling of humans, mountains rise and fall, volcanoes become lakes, lakes become forests, forests become deserts, deserts become oceans, fish become frogs, dinosaurs become birds, quadrupeds become bipeds. The notion of a "state of nature" in the West probably derives more from biblical influence than from actual science. In reality, there is no point in time for any given ecosystem at which one could point and declare it to be the definitive state of that ecosystem. Consider the current hysteria over invasive species. We'll take the decidedly unscientific war on invasive plants as an example*. In order for there to be such a thing as invasive plants, there has to be a notion of native plants. In other words, it is ideologically necessary to construct a myth of native plants, who have "always" been here, and whose venerable existence is under threat from invasive plants, who have no place being outside of their native environments. However, virtually all plants are highly mobile historically, and in many cases, can change their range annually via seed dispersal and clonal propagation. The planet undergoes periodic warming and cooling, with direct and dramatic implications for terrestrial (and aquatic) flora and fauna. Long before humans roamed North America, for example, plants adapted to warmer climes were able to make their way up to more northerly latitudes during interglacial periods, only to retreat back southward as things got cooler again. Cold-adapted plants enacted a reverse migration during ice ages. Plants are also able to access remote places like the Hawaiian Islands, the most isolated landmass on the planet and something of a "novelty" themselves in terms of their relatively recent appearance, and colonize them thoroughly despite thousands of miles of interceding ocean. New species arrived regularly throughout the islands' history, negotiating new relationships with the established plants and animals, sometimes dying out, sometimes overrunning, and sometimes striking a balance between those two extremes. Do none of these incursions into new territory count as invasions, or is it all one long story of invasion? How should one decide what dispersal events count as natural and, therefore, acceptable and desirable, and which count as unnatural and disruptive? If nature is conceived of as a pristine condition that existed before civilization, then the occurrence of novel species and chemical compounds must be considered unnatural despite the fact that they predate the existence of humans. On the other hand, if such novelty is to be considered naturally occurring after all, then there never was a pristine, primeval state of nature to begin with, just a constant series of changes. It is precisely in this light that one could argue that civilization is nothing but a direct product of natural evolution and thus as natural as a coral reef. Thus, we anarcho-primitivists can rave all we want about all the awful things technology and civilization are doing to the biosphere and to ourselves, but without convincingly and coherently addressing this glaring paradox, AP critique essentially has nowhere to go--it is trapped under the weight of its own contradictions. Defenders of civilization will accuse us of romanticism and cherry-picking, and, until we adopt a meaningful definition of nature, they will be right.

The challenge, then, is to define something that is constantly in flux. Owing to biases that can be said to be traditional to Western philosophy (peripheral thinkers like Heraclitus excepted), which prefers to conceptualize things in distinct and unchanging categories for the sake of elucidating permanent and universal truths, the nuances of nature as flux have never sat well. If science now accepts these nuances (quantum mechanics, evolution, chaos, relativity), it does so begrudgingly, as evidenced by lingering inertia in the various branches of science. For example, biologists continue to use the Latin binomial taxonomic classification system for organisms despite the fact that such a classification scheme is in many ways contrived and fails to reflect the constant genetic evolution that proceeds from one generation of a species to the next. Occasionally, a newly discovered organism throws the entire classificatory system into disarray, requiring the renaming of several members of a genus or even family. The system is furthermore not useful for illustrating ecological relationships. Rather, it is artificially imposed for the sake of maintaining the myth that the world can be organized into discrete parts, like a machine. It is revealing that, by contrast, indigenous people consistently demonstrate remarkable awareness and familiarity with virtually all organisms sharing their environment, often even surpassing the ability of researchers to identify individual species and their habits, without anything approaching the Latin binomial system. For example, a type of tree might be customarily called an elder out of recognition for its role in an ecosystem. This name immediately conveys ecological information based on local function, whereas the scientific name of sambucus canadensis, created in a language nobody even speaks anymore, indicates nothing more than the fact that this plant is related to other sambucus trees in far-flung regions of the world, and that this particular tree exists in North America (hence canadensis--"of Canada"). The scientific taxonomic system confers a distinct identity that is intended to be absolute--sambucus canadensis is sambucus canadensis even when it is in Europe, or Australia, or the international space station. No part of its identity need derive from any given environment--all organisms an island unto themselves, and nature a random assortment of pieces. However, in a traditional manner of identification, if the tree is called an elder tree and understood to be an ecological elder to other species, then it matters little whether, from a scientific viewpoint, the tree is canadensis or chinensis; as long as it is willing to fulfill the same role, then it is the same tree. In other words, an entity's identity derives from its context, not from an innate, genetically-derived identity, which depends on a sort of scientific delusion that is in denial of flux as the essential characteristic of nature. Science and, more broadly, Western philosophy exhibit a fixation regarding absolute categorization and hierarchical ranking. There is an implied assumption that precise categorization leads directly to understanding. Appreciation for the larger trajectory of an ecosystem's evolution over time is lost in the constant focus on discerning details such as the relatively spurious differences between individual related species. This focus on the minutiae of the biosphere comes at the cost of lost perspective on the course of change on the planet as a whole--failing to see the forest for the trees, both figuratively and literally. As a result, our science--the study of nature--actually has not the slightest wherewithal with which to judge something such as civilization to be natural or unnatural, and our society's intuition (or lack thereof) on what can be considered natural versus unnatural is accordingly deeply flawed. The debate of whether anything can even be considered "outside of nature" is therefore largely relegated to philosophy--in other words, indefinitely shelved.

The principal issue with defining nature seems to center on the existence of novelty. For example, we know that terrestrial animals evolved from marine animals. A sort of fish, the story goes, gradually came to spend more and more time on dry land until a branch of its progeny evolved to be able to survive outside of the water. The first fish to crawl on dry land, then, was certainly a novelty of the first order. Even a child knows that a fish naturally belongs in the water--it quickly dies, otherwise. So, does that fact make all terrestrial animals the product of the unnatural behavior of that pioneer fish? Of course, that position seems hardly tenable. However, if learning to live on land should not be considered unnatural for that ancient fish, then why should it be that, say, tossing a live mackerel into the middle of the Alps, or rocketing various animals into orbit, should be thought any more unnatural? The answer seems to do not with change in and of itself, but rather with the pace or rate of change. Tossing the mackerel onto the side of a mountain dramatically exceeds the rate at which the fish can adapt, and thus the Swiss Alps should be considered an unnatural environment for mackerel and all other fish. However, this fact does not preclude the possibility that, if allowed sufficient time and meted exposure to a foreign environment, a creature adapted to one environment could eventually undergo enough changes over generations to survive in a new one. The critical element that decides whether a novelty in the environment is natural or unnatural is therefore the rate at which that change took place. Thus, the question that should be asked about, say, genetically modified salmon, is not whether or not it is ipso facto "natural" for a salmon to consume soy and corn all its life inside a farm, but rather how long it would take for such a change in salmon adaptation to occur spontaneously--that is, without genetic modification. Obviously, such changes would take much longer, far too long for enterprise and capitalism's needs, hence GMOs, but nature has to work much more slowly because any change in one species implies a ripple effect that prods each and every other aspect of an ecosystem and possibly the entire biosphere into adjusting to that change, and of course every secondary change generated this way will entail further changes, and so on--non-linear, multilateral feedback loops that are constantly active. There is therefore no stable state devoid of change per se, but there is a relative stability in never-ending flux and adaptation so long as the pace of change does not exceed the parameters of this natural tempo. This speaks to a kind of inertia that exists across all ecosystems that both discourages sudden aberrations from occurring and that absorbs some of the shock to the system that results when such an aberration does occur. It is precisely because this inertia gets flouted in order to effect all of civilization's myriad novelties that every technological advance is decidedly unnatural. Technology, by definition, seeks to achieve something that would not otherwise result at nature's pace of change, and technological innovation is essentially the outstripping of natural change. There is no comparing that sort of artificial innovation to the evolution of a rhinoceros' horn or a bat's wings.

Nature's pace of change is itself variable and based on the totality of circumstances within the biosphere at any given moment--this is why long periods of stability in an ecosystem will tend to promote slower change whereas ecosystems undergoing sudden and dramatic disturbances will tend to see cascading changes at a faster rate. It might be useful to visualize the phenomenon of change in terms of a construct of scaffolds, similar to the scaffolding used while erecting a structure. A naturally-occurring novelty within an ecosystem can be represented as a new scaffold built atop older scaffolding. Over time, this scaffold will become integrated into the overall structure when it in turn serves as part of the immediate foundation for newer scaffolding. What would have been previously structurally impossible or unstable (unnatural) can become not only possible but necessary over time as the entire structure builds up in a steady and stable manner. The scaffolds build up like a pyramid, with the base growing wider as the structure grows taller, and with each scaffold interlocked with many other scaffolds both adjacent and distant, yielding additional stability through redundancy. This means that the removal or destruction of too many of the scaffolds from any point will have implications for the integrity of the entire structure. An occasional loss here and there under normal conditions doesn't present a real threat to stability, and even significant damage can be repaired, holes patched and failing parts replaced and even strengthened beyond previous limits. In the absence of further disturbance, it is possible for nature to incorporate an imbalance over time into a stable structure by building scaffolding to support the flaw and then eventually strengthen it so that it itself can support additional scaffolding and bridge to the other parts of the structure.

Occasional disturbances can be thought of as a way for nature to test and improve upon stability. Witness the feral revival ongoing at Chernobyl, even while radiation levels remain too high to allow humans to move back in. Because there was one catastrophic event followed by a period of relative stability, wildlife such as birds and deer have reclaimed the contaminated land in Chernobyl, though with visible effects from the lingering radiation. However, if disturbances occur at a pace that outstrips the rate at which nature can adapt to them, the resiliency of the entire structure starts to become at risk. As Homo sapiens, we, of course, also live on this structure that we are currently destabilizing. We achieve this destabilization by trying to erect a parallel structure on top of nature's structure. We call this parallel structure civilization. Civilization is erected by raiding the natural world, dismantling the various scaffolds that hold this or that aspect of the biosphere in place, and repurposing them for much narrower human designs. At a small enough scale, the strain placed by civilization on nature's structure is tolerable if not negligible, especially if the pace of civilized development does not exceed the pace of nature's own "construction", which at the outset of, say, the Holocene (11,700 years ago), would have been robust enough to withstand the first few millennia of civilized humans. However, with the advent of industrial means of production, the rate (economists call it "efficiency") of civilized development suddenly began to increase in an exponential fashion. More and more holes in the natural structure started to appear as the pace of raiding the natural world began to proceed at an increasingly reckless rate. While some of those who lived at the margins of this artificial structure of civilization could perceive the destabilizing effects of this process on nature, most of those who lived within civilization could see only progress developing at faster and faster rates while remaining insulated from the effects of this progress on the entire framework of life. The existence of an alternative structure within nature began to encourage the development of a myopic, civilization-centric mindset. The fatal flaw of this way of thinking, of course, was always the mistaken belief that civilization exists parallel to, and thus outside of, the natural world, when in reality it is an inescapable fact that civilization rests upon the very structure that it is literally dead set on tearing down. For civilization, there is no alternative to destruction of the natural world and therefore it has no other path than self-destruction. Even without the constant acceleration of growth in civilization, the sheer strain of a civilization of seven billion-going-on-nine billion sapiens and the bare minimum amount of materials and pollution required to keep them all alive to a standard that the political left finds acceptable easily outstrips nature's ability to provide at the given rate of change many times over. Civilization, therefore, is not an alternative or successor to nature, but more like a tumorous growth that feeds off of nature even as it destroys her. Tumors are not a type of external pathogenic condition in organisms, but rather a sort of imbalanced "runaway" growth of endogenous cells that no longer respond to normal signals to stop multiplying. Normal rates of cell growth are not typically problematic nor are the cells themselves inherently dangerous under nominal conditions. Cells normally divide in order to replenish dead cells and maintain homeostatic functioning within an organism. Once again, we see that it is not the fact that things change (in this case, cellular mitosis) that is the problem, but rather the rate at which that change occurs (the difference between homeostasis and cancer). One can then surmise that the "inevitability" of civilized progress is, like cancer, actually conditional. To consider civilization natural would be the same as accepting cancer as being the normal state of an organism.

When discussing rates of change in nature, it seems worthwhile to contemplate mass extinctions, as they provide illuminating examples of the principle of nature as rhythm. In particular, the extinction of most of the world's terrestrial megafauna (except for Africa) at the end of the last ice age has deep implications for anarcho-primitivist theory regarding the inherent sustainability of hunter-gatherer society. While the debate mainly between the "overkill" theorists and "climate change" advocates continues to play out, the evidence seems to more heavily support the overkill-by-humans argument without completely denying climate change's significance. Obviously, the humans in question were purely hunter-gatherer except perhaps for the domestication of dogs as companions and/or hunting partners ca. 30,000 years ago. From Wikipedia:

Outside the mainland of Afro-Eurasia, these megafaunal extinctions followed a highly distinctive landmass-by-landmass pattern that closely parallels the spread of humans into previously uninhabited regions of the world, and which shows no correlation with climatic history (which can be visualized with plots over recent geological time periods of climate markers such as marine oxygen isotopes or atmospheric carbon dioxide levels). Australia was struck first around 45,000 years ago, followed by Tasmania about 41,000 years ago (after formation of a land bridge to Australia about 43,000 years ago), Japan apparently about 30,000 years ago, North America 13,000 years ago, South America about 500 years later, Cyprus 10,000 years ago, the Antilles 6000 years ago, New Caledonia and nearby islands 3000 years ago, Madagascar 2000 years ago, New Zealand 700 years ago, the Mascarenes 400 years ago, and the Commander Islands 250 years ago. Nearly all of the world's isolated islands could furnish similar examples of extinctions occurring shortly after the arrival of Homo sapiens, though most of these islands, such as the Hawaiian Islands, never had terrestrial megafauna, so their extinct fauna were smaller.

An analysis of Sporormiella fungal spores (which derive mainly from the dung of megaherbivores) in swamp sediment cores spanning the last 130,000 years from Lynch's Crater in Queensland, Australia showed that the megafauna of that region virtually disappeared about 41,000 years ago, at a time when climate changes were minimal; the change was accompanied by an increase in charcoal, and was followed by a transition from rainforest to fire-tolerant sclerophyll vegetation. The high-resolution chronology of the changes supports the hypothesis that human hunting alone eliminated the megafauna, and that the subsequent change in flora was most likely a consequence of the elimination of browsers and an increase in fire. The increase in fire lagged the disappearance of megafauna by about a century, and most likely resulted from accumulation of fuel once browsing stopped. Over the next several centuries grass increased; sclerophyll vegetation increased with a lag of another century, and a sclerophyll forest developed after about another thousand years. During two periods of climate change about 120 and 75 thousand years ago, sclerophyll vegetation had also increased at the site in response to a shift to cooler, drier conditions; neither of these episodes had a significant impact on megafaunal abundance. Similar conclusions regarding the culpability of human hunters in the disappearance of Pleistocene megafauna were obtained via an analysis of a large collection of eggshell fragments of the flightless Australian bird Genyornis newtoni and from analysis of Sporormiella fungal spores from a lake in eastern North America.

The following two passages are taken from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I've reproduced the passages below in their entirety because I feel that they merit reading by anyone who doubts the human factor in prehistoric megafaunal extinction. Taking Australia first as a case study:

Some scholars try to exonerate our species, placing the blame on the vagaries of the climate (the usual scapegoat in such cases). Yet it is hard to believe that Homo sapiens was completely innocent. There are three pieces of evidence that weaken the climate alibi, and implicate our ancestors in the extinction of the Australian megafauna.

Firstly, even though Australia's climate changed 45,000 years ago, it wasn't a very remarkable upheaval. It's hard to see how the new weather patterns alone could have caused such a massive extinction. It's common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth's climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change.

In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming. During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average every 100,000 years. The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago. Not unusually severe for an ice age, it had twin peaks, the first about 70,000 years ago and the second at about 20,000 years ago. The giant diprotodon appeared in Australia more than 1.5 million years ago and successfully weathered at least ten previous ice ages. It also survived the first peak of the last ice age, around 70,000 years ago. Why, then, did it disappear 45,000 years ago? Of course, if diprotodons had been the only large animal to disappear at this time, it might have been just a fluke. But more than 90 per cent of Australia's megafauna disappeared along with the diprotodon. The evidence is circumstantial, but it's hard to imagine that Sapiens, just by coincidence, arrived in Australia at the precise point that all these animals were dropping dead of the chills.

Secondly, when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago. Human involvement can easily explain why the wave of extinction obliterated the terrestrial megafauna of Australia while sparing that of the nearby oceans. Despite its burgeoning navigational abilities, Homo sapiens was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial menace.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia--whenever people settled another part of the Outer World. In these cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the megafauna of New Zealand--which had weathered the alleged 'climate change' of c. 45,000 years ago without a scratch--suffered devastating blows immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, New Zealand's first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species.

A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (200 kilometres north of the Siberian coast). Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as Homo sapiens spread--first over Eurasia and then over North America--the mammoths retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world, except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island. 

And touching also on the Americas:

For decades, palaeontologists and zooarchaeologists--people who search for and study animal remains--have been combing the plains and mountains of the Americas in search of the fossilised bones of ancient camels and the petrified faeces of giant ground sloths. When they find what they seek, the treasures are carefully packed up and sent to laboratories, where every bone and every coprolite (the technical name for fossilised turds) is meticulously studied and dated. Time and again, these analyses yield the same results; the freshest dung balls and the most recent camel bones date to the period when humans flooded America, that is, between approximately 12,000 and 9000 BC. Only in one area have scientists discovered younger dung balls: on several Caribbean islands, in particular Cuba and Hispaniola, they found petrified ground-sloth scat dating to about 5000 BC. This is exactly the time when the first humans managed to cross the Caribbean Sea and settle these two large islands.

In reality, people probably should not be so hard on their own species when it comes to these mass extinctions. Other species, given the necessary conditions, have done just as much damage on their own scale. The brown tree snake accidentally introduced to Guam, the cane toad intentionally introduced to Australia, the kudzu vine currently devouring the southern United States--all have done their fair share of "ecological devastation". Organisms are designed to be opportunistic, and when a creature or plant is introduced into virgin land, it will glut itself on the available resources until some force arrives to strike a new equilibrium with it, whether that force be a new predator, new defensive adaptations by prey, or simply starvation for having eaten up absolutely everything it could. Like the above creatures, the hunter-gatherers who proceeded to exterminate the megafauna of the New World and Australia were acting more or less on instinct, which would explain the symmetry in outcomes in both locales despite complete lack of communication. They did not intentionally evolve the intelligence necessary to pull off massive mammoth slaughters, and they also did not cause a land bridge to appear between Russia and Alaska. People had no way of knowing better. They had an unfair advantage over the megafauna and they kept capitalizing on it until things started to even out. The few surviving megafauna of North America--namely, the bison, bears, wild cats, moose, and other ungulates--eventually got wise to human predation and it got significantly more difficult to nab one. This is presumably how a natural equilibrium is supposed to get established in the wake of a new imbalance, and the more sudden the introduction of a novel element into an established environment, the more time is necessary before equilibrium can be re-established. When the brown tree snake came to Guam, the native birds had no evolved wariness or defenses against snakes at all. Twelve native bird species are now extinct. However, if the snakes were left on the island long enough without human attempts at meddling, it would surely soon starve for having eaten everything there was to eat. An island is a precarious and fragile ecosystem. Witness Easter Island's inhabitants consuming their resources to the brink of self-annihilation. With the Maori of Aoterroa/New Zealand, the initial abundance of the giant flightless moa birds induced a sort of shortsighted wastefulness in the newly arrived Polynesians:

Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. Moa made such easy prey that by AD 1200 the hunting of Moa alone provided food surpluses sufficient to provide for the settling of large villages up to 3 hectares. These villages were permanent coastal encampments from which bands would set out on several week hunts to slaughter and carry back Moa. Over 300 Moa butchering sites are known, 117 on South Island which together account for some 100,000-500,000 Moa. With such abundance came a good deal of waste: as much as 50% of usable weight was discarded in the field. At around the same time as hunting was at it peak, the forests of South Island were burned off. The extraordinary abundance of food resources supported a population of as many as 10,000 people. However, by the late 1400s the Moa hunting society collapsed. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast's Eagle which had relied on them for food.--http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/moa.html

Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. Moa made such easy prey that by AD 1200 the hunting of Moa alone provided food surpluses sufficient to provide for the settling of large villages up to 3 hectares. These villages were permanent coastal encampments from which bands would set out on several week hunts to slaughter and carry back Moa. Over 300 Moa butchering sites are known, 117 on South Island which together account for some 100,000-500,000 Moa. With such abundance came a good deal of waste: as much as 50% of usable weight was discarded in the field. At around the same time as hunting was at it peak, the forests of South Island were burned off. The extraordinary abundance of food resources supported a population of as many as 10,000 people. However, by the late 1400s the Moa hunting society collapsed. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast's Eagle which had relied on them for food. - See more at: http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/moa.html#sthash.LZ4TC8hy.dpuf

Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. Moa made such easy prey that by AD 1200 the hunting of Moa alone provided food surpluses sufficient to provide for the settling of large villages up to 3 hectares. These villages were permanent coastal encampments from which bands would set out on several week hunts to slaughter and carry back Moa. Over 300 Moa butchering sites are known, 117 on South Island which together account for some 100,000-500,000 Moa. With such abundance came a good deal of waste: as much as 50% of usable weight was discarded in the field. At around the same time as hunting was at it peak, the forests of South Island were burned off. The extraordinary abundance of food resources supported a population of as many as 10,000 people. However, by the late 1400s the Moa hunting society collapsed. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast's Eagle which had relied on them for food. - See more at: http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/moa.html#sthash.LZ4TC8hy.dpuf

Moa may have been hunted to extinction within a century of human arrival to New Zealand. Moa made such easy prey that by AD 1200 the hunting of Moa alone provided food surpluses sufficient to provide for the settling of large villages up to 3 hectares. These villages were permanent coastal encampments from which bands would set out on several week hunts to slaughter and carry back Moa. Over 300 Moa butchering sites are known, 117 on South Island which together account for some 100,000-500,000 Moa. With such abundance came a good deal of waste: as much as 50% of usable weight was discarded in the field. At around the same time as hunting was at it peak, the forests of South Island were burned off. The extraordinary abundance of food resources supported a population of as many as 10,000 people. However, by the late 1400s the Moa hunting society collapsed. By about A.D. 1400 all moa are generally thought to have become extinct, along with the Haast's Eagle which had relied on them for food. - See more at: http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/moa.html#sthash.LZ4TC8hy.dpuf

The birds, like the dodo, had no fear of humans and were easily caught. The Maori were said to be extremely wasteful with the meat, only keeping the tastiest portions and letting the rest rot. True, both the Maori and the Rapa Nui came from Polynesian agricultural stock and it could be argued that their imprudence somehow stems from that cultural background, but on the whole that argument seems weak. At the very least, it seems doubtful that a group of hunter-gatherers transported to a pristine island in the Pacific would have behaved all that differently, except that maybe they'd die off much sooner for want of having taro and pigs to start off with.

This characterization of ancient peoples as wasteful and imprudent with their natural resources stands in stark contrast to the image of indigenous people that most anarcho-primitivists and even the indigenous peoples themselves hold of their ancestors, who, it is claimed, have always lived with nothing but reverence and respect for nature and have always sought balance with the environment, making use of every part of hunted game, and so on and so forth. One way to resolve this contradiction, of course, is to just simply ignore zooarchaeological evidence and go on reveling in noble savage myths. I suspect many anarcho-primitivists will proceed to do just that due to being ideologically invested in these myths. Indeed, most indigenous peoples take serious offense at the suggestion that their ancestors were solely responsible for the extinction of most of the rare animals and plants in their country. For example, both native Hawaiians and Maori insist that their ancestors always taught them not to be greedy with game and fish, and there is truth to this. Taboos concerning when and under what circumstances an animal may be taken, for example, are numerous in such cultures, and it is clear to see from ethnographic accounts and ongoing cultural practices that waste is and was frowned upon. However, the assumption that, in the absence of any actual historical evidence, the ancient Polynesians were so conserving of resources from the very beginning, is contradicted by the archaeological evidence. One should not necessarily conclude that the Hawaiians or Maori are being disingenuous, but it does appear that they suffer from a sort of cultural amnesia regarding that early period of their history when their ancestors very understandably glutted themselves on all the low-hanging fruit. Only after this initial gluttony did the various Polynesian cultures begin to change, and this was only possible probably after some form of damage or reduction in easily-obtained wild food became apparent, i.e. species extinctions. Culture finally caught up to reality and this new-found respect for nature became ingrained in many Polynesian cultures' beliefs; therefore it is not surprising that native Polynesians take such exception to the notion that they were responsible for species extinctions early in their history. It just shows how thorough and powerful culture can be. The first Polynesian colonizers had to "eat spiders" for a while before they decided that that was not the best course, and now no one recalls ever having eaten spiders, but one can be fairly certain that at some point, somebody did.

Culture can be almost any kind of story, and in that sense it's a great hoax, and a new culture cannot be said ipso facto to be any less authentic and legitimate than an established one, but attention should be paid to the likely consequences of any given culture if one were in the business of choosing between multiple options. A culture based on detachment from nature and non-stop economic growth implies a certain set of consequences, whereas a culture based on sparse, low-tech band societies implies a different set. As Kaczynski pointed out over 20 years ago, popularizing an alternative culture to that of industrial civilization is a stratagem that we can and should use to change people's relationship to nature. In all likelihood, it's probably the only viable option we have at our disposal. Culture, like nature, needs sufficient time to catch up to a sudden novelty. The novel The Lord of the Flies and the like all riff on the assumption that without authority, humans will invariably devolve back to what Hobbes always said we were: nasty brutes who incessantly kill one another. While this outcome would almost certainly be true in the short term, it would be strange to think that, given enough time of this, some sort of cultural solution would not organically arise to address the problems introduced by the original anomalous situation, the same way it has for the Polynesians and for all cultures who have weathered the mistakes of their early pasts and have matured enough to find stability with their environment. That's what culture is, after all--an amalgamation of attempts to solve recurring problems by literally changing the way an entire society thinks on the most fundamental level, even to the point of collective amnesia of things ever having been different. The domestication of fire, for example, was a significant achievement for humans, and I am not aware of any anarcho-primitivists who would go so far as to reject even fire as a technology. However, fire can be dangerous, so it almost certainly took a long time--generations--for people to make all the mistakes one could possibly make with fire before all the variables were grasped  and humans were mature enough to handle fire responsibly. The pace of change in the adoption of this radical new technology still fell within the bounds of what the human mind could grasp, and the damage inflicted upon nature via human fire was incorporated and transformed into a new synergy, with organisms adapting and even benefiting from, say, controlled burns of forest understories. Thus, by means of slowly adopting a new technology, both humans and nature had time to integrate the novelty and produce a new synergy. The novel essentially becomes natural by virtue of acceptable rate of change, as opposed to any sort of static, inherent quality of "natural" or "artificial". Currently, it seems that human culture is trying but failing to incorporate the novelties that technological development keeps throwing at us. The rate of change is not only too fast, but it keeps accelerating. Culture is losing the race badly. This would be the main qualitative difference between, say, a culture learning to incorporate fire-based technology and our current situation, where we cannot even all agree on the basic issues to begin with. Even in the case of early sapiens seemingly having caused the extinction of the majority of the planet's megafauna wherever they roamed outside of Africa, they still did not enact change at a rate that outstripped the biosphere's ability to adapt. The planet survived the quaternary extinction event, just as it did the previous waves of massive extinctions long before humans were around. Certainly, the killing of the terrestrial megafauna came nowhere close in terms of thoroughness or planetary impact to, say, the Cretaceous-Paleogene event that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs, or the even earlier Permian-Triassic event (evocatively termed "the great dying"). The catastrophes of the past, while appearing explosive in historical retrospect, still occurred slowly enough to abide by nature's rhythm of change. By contrast, what technology continues to demonstrate to us in terrifying clarity is that the catastrophes of the present and the future will continue to occur and accumulate at ever faster rates, achieving an unprecedented type of novelty: the truly artificial, the fundamentally other, the collapse of synthesis, the antithesis of existence.

*For a good read on the madness that is invasive plant hysteria in the US, see Timothy Lee Scott's Invasive Plant Medicine

The Appeal of the Islamic State to Westerners and the Fallout from Techno-Scale Reality

The ascension of the extremist Islamist group known variously as the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, or Da'esh, shocked most Westerners with its sudden appearance on the mainstream media radar in the wake of multiple successful campaigns to expand the group's territory, taking over important cities and infrastructure in Iraq and Syria. As most people by now have heard, the ranks of the group, which I will just refer to from here on out as ISIS, have been steadily bolstered by recruits from Western nations. By some estimations, at least three thousand men and women from the United States, Canada, and Europe have joined the fighting in Iraq and Syria to date on the side of ISIS. Many living in the West may find this trend baffling--why give up the peace and comfort of one's middle-class life, journey to a very dangerous place where, in some cases, one doesn't even speak the language, endure Spartan living conditions, and throw in with a group roundly condemned by one's government, media, and neighbors for brazen acts of violence? The motivation behind such a decision will probably elude you if you fail to recognize the deeply embedded need in humans for a human-scale reality, and in modern industrial societies especially, due to our ingrained, myopic fixation on 'human potential' and 'limitless possibilities' through technology and human ingenuity, it is almost automatically assumed that any sane person would prefer peace and tolerance over war and brutality.¹

We know from comparative anthropology and archaeology that, in stark contrast to Western culture, non-industrialized, pre-modern, and traditional cultures were characterized by cohesive worldviews that generally supported what I've been calling 'human-scale' reality. All traditional cultures, for example, have an explanation of how people came to be and how things around them worked. For every question, there was already an answer that every member of the culture either knew or could find out from someone who knew. Such ideas about the world were not open to debate, nor did it seem likely that anyone within a given culture would even think to question them--what would there have been to gain, when each generation's goal was simply the continuation of the previous generations' ways? There would have been a deep sense of comfort in knowing how everything in the universe worked and fit together, and understanding one's place within that universe--things are no different in modern organizations like religious congregations, cults, clubs, etc. A face-to-face community bound together by shared views on the world, egalitarian treatment and good standing, a common goal, and a deep conviction in the correctness of one's actions: this is what a human-scale reality looks like, and, as the evidence of anthropology and archaeology argues, this is what humans have grown used to over two million years of existence. It is, arguably, what the human mind expects to find when it looks out into the world. However, thanks to the assault of Western scientific progress, it is more or less impossible to maintain this scale; as it expanded outward from Europe in three waves of resource-hunger, the first as Roman ambition, the second under the guise of Christian evangelical glory and manifest destiny, and the third in the form of industrial capitalism's total war on the world, Western society has incorporated and devoured all the cultures it has touched, basically rendering traditional cultural worldviews obsolete and feverishly replacing them with a different scale of reality: first, an imperial civilization-scale; second, a transcendental Christian-scale; third, a capitalist techno-scale. This is how the ongoing zombie apocalypse has played out. Instead of having a clear, straightforward, and satisfying answer to questions regarding things like the purpose of life, people now are expected to define the purpose of life more or less for themselves, individually, as an inviolable matter of personal belief, to be based ideally on the exposure made possible by a modern education and access to the internet and books to many different viewpoints and an overwhelming amount of information and arguments that are typically contradictory and inconclusive. The amount of evidence an individual has to consider in determining solutions to the central questions about life that culture can no longer answer accumulates exponentially and the pressure and pitfalls of trying to keep up with it all can be staggering, even mentally harmful, typically resulting in a feeling of being totally lost and detached, even paralyzed. Even worse, the answer an individual decides upon might be rejected by those around her, effectively alienating her. People don't do well in heterogeneous groups with different beliefs, values, goals, and expectations of behavior. Cooperation and communication easily break down and must then be enforced by an arbitrary authority. Science has succeeded in giving every other culture an inferiority complex and crippling their ability to form a cogent worldview, leaving a critical void where a definitive cultural narrative ought to exist.

Scientific rationalism, then, is clearly not compatible with healthy human psychology. The attempt to understand phenomena exclusively via objective observation and logic is unnatural and frequently counterintuitive. This much is obvious given that scientists need to undergo a lot of training to properly apply the scientific method and to understand and check their own biases and logical fallacies. To do science, an individual needs to turn her back on her evolved humanity as well as reject an intimate, subjective relationship to the world. For a society to embrace science, even those who do not personally perform science must be taught to accept scientific thought as the most legitimate form of thought, and scientific ideas as the most concrete and real, even though scientific thought and ideas are frequently counterintuitive and complex, requiring elucidation and mediation by specialists whose claims by definition cannot be verified by lay people. Already, the human scale has been lost by virtue of the need for this mediation. Lay parents, for example, have long since been barred from teaching their own children a traditional worldview and culturally important skills passed down to them by their elders, but instead must now relegate all aspects of their children's education, with direct implications for children's development and identity, to strangers and outsiders whose credentials as an institution are not open to question. When a way of knowing based on subjective experience, intuition, and folk knowledge passed down by previous generations is in conflict with what science holds to be correct, one usually must yield to the scientific authority or else be considered naive, stubborn, ignorant, or fanatical--in other words, not to be taken seriously, and therefore not representative of society's standards. The same dynamic manifests in all hierarchical relationships--civilians don't get to question cops, Catholics don't get to question the Pope, and tax payers don't get to question the Internal Revenue Service. The specialists in positions of authority are privy to information you aren't, and because you don't know what they know, you have no leverage to influence the policies they enact. As a result, one's intuitive worldview becomes increasingly irrelevant, and the value of personal assessments of the world diminishes. Our ability to comprehend the world and therefore to make sound decisions is essentially outsourced to specialists who retroactively inform us after the fact of how and what we think; this describes the basic mechanism of propaganda and why it is needed in civilized societies.

Science, however, differs from all other forms of propaganda in a significant way. Perhaps what makes science even more oppressive than, say, medieval hierarchical societies based on the doctrine of the divine right of kings, is that science consists of theories that are always subject to change pending compelling evidence. At least in a pre-scientific age, an individual or a social class or group could count on the worldview they were taught when they were young, regardless of how unjust or oppressive, to stay the same throughout their lifetimes. People are adaptable, and as long as everyone seems to agree on a certain interpretation, humans seem to have been capable of accepting the consensus and conducting their lives accordingly without feeling the strain of ontological doubt and existential uncertainty. In constrast, to be a good scientist or a good member of a scientific society, one must always be open to changing virtually everything one believes to be true at any given moment. Science is always developing, and nothing can be stated with absolute certainty lest the central tenets of science be violated. This is considered a revolutionary virtue of science, compared to the unchanging beliefs passed down through many generations in traditional cultures. The problem, once again, is that the human mind does not appear to like this sort of ambiguity, and seems to suffer greatly when forced to accept it. Some individuals can be trained to embrace science's unresolvable ambiguities (and are subsequently rewarded for doing so), but I would argue that the average person constantly rebels against this paradigm, even if unconsciously, by holding a few unassailable convictions throughout her life, whether they be about the existence of God, certain ethical questions like all children deserve an education, that dark-skinned men are dangerous, that vitamin C boosts the immune system (it doesn't), or that homosexuality is a disease. Probably the only dogmatic axiom in all of science is the implied presumption that only things that can be objectively observed are actual and real; overall, science is far too impoverished in unshakeable dictums to fill the void left by culture. The average person in modern society still craves the all-encompassing certainty of a human-scale worldview that countless prior generations of humans enjoyed, and to this person, science and its corollary strains of liberalism and progressivism are constant and pervasive tyrants, systematically denying both certainty and meaning to a mind that starves for the return of an intuitively comprehensible and universally shared worldview. This tendency is particularly evident in immigrants from more 'traditional' places. Wherever such immigrants immigrate to, they tend to hold close to their own cultural conventions, replete with religious beliefs, customs, foods, and usually a healthy dose of racism, all in direct defiance of liberal and scientific principles. Many immigrants gather together in migrant communities or form ethnic neighborhoods. Often, immigrant parents do not want their children to date or marry outside of their ethnicity. These insular tendencies, while sometimes tolerated and even romanticized as constituting part of the charm and allure of living in a multicultural city, more often than not get portrayed unsympathetically as being backwards and distinctly un-American, with the usual moral of such stories being that racial and cultural tolerance, acculturation by accepting Western education, and participation in mainstream Western capitalist society represent the proper aspirations of immigrants and the true American dream. Only a token, moderate expression of cultural pride or ethnic identity is tolerated; one may perhaps wear traditional dress on holidays as long as it does not scandalize conventional norms of modesty and decency, or eat traditional foods as long as they are not too disgusting to mainstream American sensibilities, but one cannot, for example, consider the word of God in the Qu'ran to have more weight than the US Constitution, or engage in polygamy as per your people's customs. A true and complete expression of any foreign culture in proximity to any other culture is by definition a challenge if not a threat, and therefore only emasculated versions similar to the ones on display at Disneyworld are tolerated. Likewise, the mantra espousing that "We are all one human family underneath it all" is critical propaganda in enabling the globalization that industrialism so desperately needs. As the world becomes globalized in the image of capitalist industry, it becomes possible to observe the implementation of this leftist worldview as official policy in more and more nations, as only the leftist myth of all-inclusive, secular, color-blind, gender-neutral international cooperation can establish the psychological foundation necessary to induce otherwise xenophobic and tribally-oriented peoples to forgo traditional bonds and accept membership in a global economy.

Generations of people growing up in industrial nations, especially in progressive urban centers, will have internalized this contrived leftist morality to the point where, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we all still believe that it is not only acceptable, but morally incumbent upon us all to promote tolerance and build a society that somehow accommodates people of all views. Witness Article 1 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood", and Article 2:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The above credenda are phrased in a seemingly optimistic and humanistic tone, but actually express a sentiment of subjugation. The notion that everyone is equal is tantamount to stating that there can be no basis for group identity or cultural uniqueness--anyone who asserts that her group is special is violating the above articles. This way of thinking exists purely to enable the urbanizing and globalizing tendencies of industrial capitalism, technology, and science. Without these forces, such assertions concerning the equality of all human beings would be irrelevant. It should be obvious that for most of human existence, each band or village naturally considered itself to be special--it would have been the only society that mattered to its members, indeed, the only one with which they were completely familiar. Life revolved around their group. Many indigenous names of various aboriginal tribes support the antiquity of this ethnocentrism: "Dene", "Gwich'in", "Inuit", "Lenape", "L'nuk", "Maklak", "Mamaceqtaw", "Ndee", "Numakiki", "Numinu", "Nuutsiu", "Olek'wol", "Tanaina", and "Tsitsistas" are just some of the indigenous names by which Native American tribes identified themselves to outsiders that all translate simply as "the people". Tribes like the Sahnish, Anishinaabe, Dunne-za, Gaigwu and Nuxbaaga are even more assertive of their central importance with names that mean "the original people", "the principal people", or "the true people". Many more examples can be found if we were to include aborigines from outside of North America.² Obviously, this ethnocentrism cannot be cited as evidence of backwards racism or chauvinism; rather, it strongly corroborates my argument that people are naturally adapted to a high degree of insularity and cultural isolation, and appear to have lived quite well for several hundred thousand years that way. No indigenous culture prior to encountering Europeans had any clue as to the breadth of foreign cultures residing in far off parts of the planet, as these other cultures did not affect its way of life in the slightest until contact with Europeans was established. When different indigenous groups did encounter one another, they certainly did not extend the same rights and protections they reserved for their own people to the foreign group, who were, of course, naturally considered less than real people. Native American tribes often saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of an outsider, white or native; whereas such behavior would have been unacceptable if directed at another member of one's tribe, one would receive the approbations of peers if one pulled off a ballsy swindle on some unfamiliar sap. Indigenous peoples of both the New World and Australia have been documented by European explorers to act in seemingly erratic and contradictory ways upon encountering them, apparently out of not really knowing the best way to approach a foreign entity that could turn out to be dangerous. Sometimes the natives would decide to shower the explorers with immense generosity in the form of gifts and food, whereas other times the same people might try to loot or outright kill the strangers unprovoked; still other times the natives would simply flee at the sight of them. One humorous account in Bill Bryson's travelogue of Australia In A Sunburned Country tells of how a group of aborigines, upon encountering a European explorer in the desert, stared in seeming bemusement until one of them casually inserted the tip of his spear into the stranger in order to see what would happen.

Sadly, history holds far more sobering examples of the consequences of clashing worldviews and xenophobia enabled by technology. As history has attempted to show us time and time again, simply encountering a foreign worldview induces anxiety and is an easy trigger to violence. Mandating tolerance and diversity via authority and propaganda is inherently oppressive from an anthropological and even biological point of view. People shouldn't be forced to learn, against all evolutionary programming, to accept the cognitive dissonance that comes with the constant presence of strangers in their space. They should be able to live in a human-scale environment where familiarity can beget confidence, connectedness, and a sense of security. Bashing on, say, neo-Nazis or homophobes is really beside the point. Such intolerant people perceive things in black and white because, on a very basic psychological level, they are trying to salvage and affirm the simplicity of the human scale against the accelerating onslaught of techno-scale political correctness. Their prejudice simply reveals the sickness of the techno-scale reality and its empty reverence for universal tolerance. Their intolerance is a backlash to the implicit psychological violence that modern civilization inflicts upon them in order to coerce acceptance of a reality their biology instinctively rejects.

In light of this unrequited need for a human-scale reality, it should not be that surprising that fundamentalist movements--groups who hold hard and fast to scripture or doctrine as the literal truth and ultimate authority regarding all things--hold such strong appeal to those who feel disaffected and alienated by the epistemological and moral ambiguity of science, whose dissolution of a cohesive and intuitive worldview shared by others leaves these marginalized people to seek meaning in a consumerism that is ultimately unsatisfying. The high profile of ISIS coupled with its immense success in its campaigns in Iraq and Syria make the group highly attractive to those living disenfranchised lives in the West. Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group, an intelligence agency, writes in his report on foreign fighters in Syria that ISIS recruits from France, who number more than seven hundred to date, are characterized as "disaffected, aimless and lacking a sense of identity or belonging". He goes on directly to state:

This appears to be common across most nationalities and fits with the high number of converts, presumably people are seeking a greater purpose and meaning in their lives. Indeed, the Islamist narrative of Syria as a land of 'jihad' features prominently in the propaganda of extremist groups on both sides of the war, just as it does in the social media comments of their foreign recruits. The opportunity and desire to witness and take part in a battle prophesized 1,400 years earlier is a strong motivator. And for some, so too is the opportunity to die as a 'martyr', with extremist sheikhs and other self-appointed religious pundits declaring that anyone who dies fighting the 'infidel' enemy, whoever that may be, will be favored in the afterlife.”

As reports such as those referenced in the above links reveal, there is a strong sense of camaraderie and shared purpose that exists within ISIS's ranks. A disaffected individual from the West can easily find what she felt was lacking from her old life in joining ISIS, and the organization's propaganda, targeted at young muslims using social media, seems to suggest that ISIS is keenly aware of the appeal of the human-scaled, simplified view of the world they can offer and the potential for fellowship that such a view possesses. Because the West long ago rejected religious dogma and championed universalist science, it cannot offer any of these things, and, as we can see, for many people the lack of absolutes in a scientific society drives them into the welcoming arms of an ideology that promises to shrink the world back down to size and that indeed is already demonstrating the vitality of its simplistic worldview through ISIS's continued military victories against the  more "civilized" nations, which, in their eyes, are also victories against weak convictions and ineffectual leftist universalism/globalism.

The West may be troubled and baffled by the steady stream of its citizens joining up for militant jihad, but now we can see that the West's confusion belies its longstanding denial. High technology civilization tries hard to convince us that the distinction between a human-scale reality and a techno-scale one isn't real, and even if it were, it doesn't mean that humans cannot easily adapt from the former over to the latter. It will go so far as to disclaim all our various anxieties, neuroses, psychoses, and physical diseases along with growing rates of suicide and depression, persistent substance abuse, and an ever-expanding penchant for appalling acts of violence that now extends to joining foreign terrorist militias, protesting ignorance of the cause of these ills, always mindful to characterize those who act out with force as 'uncivilized', when the truth is just the opposite.

¹I have to say that this post is not meant to endorse the actions of ISIS or any other terrorist group, though I am certainly not condemning them, either. That's what the UN is for. I encourage those citizens of the US who recoil at the atrocities ISIS inflicts upon those they consider 'infidels' or enemies of their way of life to contemplate the following seldom-recounted piece of American history:

In 1813 several hundred Cherokees enlisted under the command of a bush lawyer turned general, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory, as he became known for his intractable personality, was forty-six, gaunt, shrewd, violent, one arm crippled by dueling wounds--the latest from a duel with his own brother. Of Carolina frontier stock, he hated Indians but was more than willing to employ them as high-grade cannon fodder. His Creek War, hailed by Jackson as a victory for civilization, was notorious for the savagery of white troops under his command. They skinned dead Creeks for belt leather; and Davy Crockett, who was there, told how a platoon set fire to a house with "forty-six warriors in it" and afterward ate potatoes from the cellar basted in human fat.--Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492

We now pay homage to Old Hickory, who later became the seventh president of the United States, by printing his likeness on our currency. Readers from fellow civilized nations: feel free to supply your own favorite "victory for civilization" from your homeland's illustrious history, and we'll show those jihadis how truly civilized people behave.

²In our mostly de-tribalized, nuclear family paradigm in the West, this penchant to claim uniqueness for one's own can nevertheless still be observed in the way an individual normally considers her parents or children to be special. For example, consider the tendency of civilized children to each call their respective parents "mom" and "dad"; they apply this term only to their own respective parents, and even though the terms are not useful for disambiguation on a larger scale of organization, people still seem beholden to what the left technically would consider a backward and tribally-minded holdover from our unfortunate evolutionary past, this insistence of all people to hurtfully and divisively reserve the terms "mom" and "dad" exclusively for their parents, as if each person's parents were somehow unique, each mother the warmest, each father the strongest. Of course, most individuals don't feel that their parents or children are interchangeable and equivalent to others; I would argue that this is normal human psychology. Any child instinctively understands that her parents are far more important than anyone else's parents; other people's parents occupy a mostly marginal place in a child's life. In a tribal society, this mentality naturally extends to the tribe as a whole vis a vis other, less familiar groups. My point here is that liberalism would prefer you see this way of thinking as a violation of universal human rights.

The Domesticated Breath

Note: The following post also appears on Communiques of the Suburban Liberation Front's original post on the topic of "spirit". As this topic is of particular interest to me and to Chinese philosophy, medicine, art, and culture in general, I have reproduced my comment below. Please read the original post here.

"I found this to be an interesting post in light of what I think I have detected from reading your blog to be at least a partial respect for Cartesian philosophy, as I think the current associations people make to the word “spirit” mostly derive from having to rearrange definitions around the Cartesian dualistic framework. Spirit went from being something like a vital motive substance to a far less tangible essence, ghost, or permeation due to the fact that, upon vivisecting a dog, for example, no such material matching the notion of spirit was found. Spirit, then, in order to be salvaged, was recast as an intangible quality whose existence became highly questionable, unlike blood, bile, etc. So you didn’t find the spirit upon cutting open a live animal? That’s okay! We’ll just say it’s invisible/intangible from now on! Of course, in the wake of the scientific revolution of Descartes and Bacon, belief in spirit became less and less respectable.

I personally believe that a major reason why European civilization, and not just any/all other types of civilization, became dominant and rapidly started to destabilize the biosphere and other societies, is because of the conscientious rejection of intuitive and received knowledge that has been so characteristic of Western civilization since the Enlightenment. As Jared Diamond points out, during the 15th century you had (at least) four loci of civilization that were comparably developed: the Far East (China, Japan), Southern Asia (India), the Middle East, and Medieval Europe (Diamond doesn’t count the civilizations of North and South America, but I think you arguably could include some of them in this example). If you think about it, none but the last really seemed to even have an ambition to spread across the oceans the way that the Europeans eventually did, and certainly not for lack of ability, at least in the case of China. It was more like a lack of desire that seems almost incomprehensible to the Westernized mind. I believe that the non-Western civilizations could never have produced a Descartes, and, prior to Christianity’s institutionalization in Europe, neither could Western civilization (this argument needs to unfold in its own post on Wilderness Before the Dawn, and I promise it will). As it happens, I believe that looking at the terms for “spirit” and “breath” in any given culture gives a reliable reading of that culture’s level of connection with the natural world. In addition to the examples you’ve mentioned above, I would add the Eastern terms qi/ki and prana and the Polynesian concept of ha. Qi is the Chinese word for “air” or “breath”. You may know it from the term Qigong, which essentially means “breath training”. Ki is the Japanese pronunciation of the same word. Qi is a common word, spoken every day in Chinese, in various compounds. It literally refers to the air that fills up your lungs, but also to the air (oxygen) that circulates inside the bodies’ channels to give you life, and also to a person’s spirit or mood, as well as the same qualities in non-human entities as well. Thus, the term for weather is tianqi, which translates to “sky’s air, sky’s mood”, similar to the way “air” is sometimes used in English to describe an attitude or other intangible quality: an air of superiority, a mischievous air. This English usage in itself either derives from or makes reference to a time when the word meant essentially the same thing in English and Chinese–the spirit that animates you was as mundane as the air everyone breathes, and the breath in your lungs was as numinous as your spirit–they were one in the same. The definitions become problematic today only because we have to artificially separate the ‘physical’ meaning of air as the substance in our atmosphere from the originally related, almost synonymous meaning of air as an intangible aura or permeation. As a result, you’ll see a lot of crazy, mystical, abstruse, or absurd definitions for qi in English, when one could simply define it as “air/breath, the way we used to mean it in English before Science”. Interestingly, the very first instance of the word qi in writing is in the Mencius, a 4th century BC Confucian text, in which qi is described as sort of a viscous, almost sludgy substance that courses through the body during exertion. Prana is the sanskrit term for vital force, and in Indian traditions of healing and tantric practices, it is considered the primary vayu (wind/air) that gives rise to the other life-supporting functions of the body. As in the concept of qi, prana is thought to enter the body as breath and gets sent to every part of the body via the circulatory system. It’s noteworthy to remember that the speakers of Sanskrit derived from speakers of Indo-European, strongly suggesting an ancient underlying tradition common to both Hindi speakers and speakers of most European languages regarding the connection or even identicality between breath and spirit. The Polynesian concept of ha also corresponds to both the prosaic notion of breathing as well as the idea of spirit in the metaphysical sense that modern English commonly denotes, e.g., foreigners are known as ha’ole in Hawaiian–those without spirit."

I would add to my original comment that the splitting of meanings for the terms that originally meant both spirit and breath that occurred in English and other European languages seems to precisely mirror the dualism that came to infect Western thought after Descartes. In other words, our extraction of two terms, breath and spirit, from an original whole concept, reflects the mental delusion and cultural sickness that characterizes Western civilization. We lack a fundamental connection with the rest of the world that we no longer even recognize as missing not just linguistically, but conceptually. Civilized breath is now stifled, halting, constrained, tense, nervous, and paltry compared to the breathing one can readily witness in non-domesticated peoples, and Westernized cultures have the most breathing problems of all, and not simply from air pollution. If the breath is also the spirit, then the spirit of the West is diseased indeed.

Anarcho-Primitivism's Elephant in the Room

To enhance life is ominous; to force the breath is to strain it; to exert strength is to promote aging. All this contradicts the Dao, and whatsoever contradicts the Dao soon ceases to exist.--Dao De Jing Chapter 55 (my translation)

Anarcho-primitivism seems to have always struggled with the accusation of being inherently "genocidist". More recently, it has become fashionable to furthermore dismiss it as "ableist", another scarlet letter to which we "primmies" seem frantic and, very frankly, dismally unprepared to adequately respond. I suspect the reason for our terrible track record in defending against these criticisms is mainly due to a reluctance to fully accept the actual implications of anarcho-primitivist philosophy--a lot of us haven't been honest with ourselves. I think it's time for a little honesty.

I've written here and here about the necessity of completely aligning our will with nature's, or what is known in Daoist terms as the Dao. For all the customary mysticism that people tend to attribute to the philosophy, Daoism is really pretty simple at base. The core tenet may be summarized: the only way to thrive in a world completely determined by natural principles is to live in accordance with them. Industrial humans seem to have forgotten that the world, not to mention the rest of the universe, is indeed completely determined by the Dao; instead, they fantasize that technology allows you to escape or transcend such natural limits and permits you control over your own fate, and the fates of those who are "less evolved". Science and technology embody the mentality that nature can actually be improved upon if understood well enough. I would argue that there is actually nothing that gives people the ability to flout nature's laws with impunity--after all, even technology must obey natural principles like physical laws and chemical realities--and, therefore, the only way to maintain the possibility of life on Earth is to learn from nature's lead. In my very first post, I cited the example of an oak tree's acorns: for the health of the forest as a whole, while it is extremely important that each individual acorn will strive to grow into a full-sized oak tree, it is equally just as important that most acorns will never have a chance to sprout due to being consumed by squirrels or rotting away in water, etc. Nature does not favor the oaks over the squirrels, nor the squirrels over the acorns. The oak tree wants a stable environment first and foremost, and allows nature to calibrate how many acorns it produces, how many become trees, and how many serve as squirrel food, all toward the goal of maintaining stability in the ecosystem. One single organism or species is incapable of correctly assessing the infinite variables and feedback loops that comprise a complex ecosystem, and if the oaks were to somehow over- or under-produce their acorn crops in defiance of nature's carefully wrought calibrations, the impact would be felt on all levels of life throughout that ecosystem, possibly for years. There is compelling research that forests behave as an integrated emergent organism, much like how individual cells from different types of tissue constitute a human being:

For example, during spruce budworm infestations, spruce forests always contain trees that do not produce alterations in terpene chemistry. Researchers examining the trees have found that they can increase their production, they simply do not. In other words, these are not "weaker" trees that are simply succumbing to a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest dynamic, but strongly healthy trees that are intentionally not increasing chemistry production. The long-range benefits of this are clear: By not raising antifeedant actions in all the trees, the forest makes sure that resistance does not develop in spruce budworms as it does in crop insects exposed to pesticides. Plant communities literally set aside plants for the insects to consume so as to not force genetic rearrangement and the development of resistance.--Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants

Thus, if an individual oak naturally gets sick and dies, we would not mourn for it from a Daoist perspective just as we do not mourn the death of a white blood cell when it sacrifices itself for the sake of homeostasis when it engulfs a pathogen in the body--the white blood cell was part of something bigger, and so are we, not just in some mystical, new age, metaphorical sense, but in actual, functional reality. Humans can be considered a type of constituent cell meant to function in harmony with other cells that together comprise the planet, itself a part of a larger entity we call the solar system, and so on. An anti-technology stance is by definition one that rejects artifice and the manipulation of nature; it is a philosophical position that inherently champions the way of nature, and yet, when it comes down to nature understandably itching to reduce the overblown human population for the sake of the health of the entire biosphere by means of disease, genetic degradation, or simply letting us choke on our own refuse, etc., why is it that we primitivists suddenly become gun shy about allowing nature to do to humans what a functioning immune system in an animal does to a malignant growth or bacterial infection? I suspect it has to do with lingering leftist sentiments that confer ultimate value to human life above all other considerations, including detriment to the planet's ecology. We may try to deflect away from discussing the elephant in the room, we may try to avoid the issue or change subjects, whatever it takes to not admit that anarcho-primitivist philosophy, if taken literally, demands a massive die off in human population (as well as bovine, porcine, grain, and all other associated domesticated animal and crop populations). It is a knee jerk response inherited from deeply entrenched liberal idealism to deny the slightest whiff of misanthropy, and too often this self-consciousness has undermined primitivist arguments. From the Daoist perspective, since humans and all other aspects of life depend on nature/Dao for their existence, not the other way around, it only makes sense to align with nature, even at the temporary expense of humans, because in the long run abiding by natural principles, including those that govern population size and the health of gene pools, ultimately ensures that all other living things may also thrive in proper proportion relative to the rest of the biosphere. Does nature behave genocidally, or have ableist biases? Of course. If it didn't avail itself of these tendencies when appropriate, the result would be dangerous for all life. If humans are a cell type that forms part of the whole planet, then right now I think it's safe to say we're behaving like a cancer. Cancer cells, of course, die along with the host when the host expires, so the cancer doesn't gain anything by spreading--the cancer is ultimately malignant to itself, as well. It spreads because it is out of balance--something isn't working correctly. Nature wants to bring things back into balance so that life can continue to thrive. 

We've acknowledged anarcho-primitivism's elephant in the room, but what about civilization's? It is true that high technology is what makes it possible for seven billion people to exist on this planet. Technology produces more food than could ever naturally occur, prevents more deaths through medical and safety interventions, provides the infrastructure necessary to manage and control the potentially problematic behavior of vast numbers of life forms (human and non-human alike), and enables the transport and trade of all manner of products throughout the globe, just to name a few of the obvious ones on the list. I would pause here to point out that technology, of course, isn't magic, though some seem to treat it as though the above boons were basically free lunches made possible thanks to our species' grand intellect. In fact, to consider the effects of technology as net gains for humans, one would have to be almost willfully ignoring the corollary questions of, for example, if technology produces more food than would naturally occur (by definition exceeding sustainability, since nature already generated life in a balanced way at the maximum possible sustainable rate at the time of agriculture's adoption), then what are the short and long term consequences of imposing an unnaturally high demand on the environment, favoring a few species we like to eat at the expense of many others we don't like to eat, and, by extension, what might be the pragmatic and moral issues associated with allowing a population wholly dependent on this unnatural (read: unsustainable) scheme for its survival to continue reproducing be over time? After all, the ratio of caloric expenditure to caloric recovery in conventional agriculture went from 1:2 in the 1940s to an absurd 10:1 today. Or, just how many deaths of and injuries and insults to other life forms (again, human and non-human alike) must routinely occur by means of habitat loss, carbon emissions, pollution from drug factories, persistent drug compounds entering the soil and water from patient bodily waste, radiographic waste, countless disposable latex and plastic gloves, tools, and packaging, etc., to sustain the life of one privileged boy or girl with a genetic defect or disability from an accident? Obviously, I could repeat examples almost endlessly, all with the same glaring point: whatever the vaunted benefits of any given technology, the drawbacks thereof invariably negate and outweigh them. 

For a group of people whose core principle consists of rejecting high technology, anarcho-primitivists are embarrassingly coy about the very obvious consequences of taking away the high-tech systems that enable the feeding of our seven billion sapiens or the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of all our life-saving medications and devices. While there might be the slimmest chance that jettisoning technology would occur in a systematic stepping-down process over many decades to allow for a relatively less traumatic shift worldwide to a non-industrial lifestyle, it seems clear that in most scenarios, the removal of high technology will lead to massive death tolls, disease, catastrophic meltdowns of currently active nuclear plants, and a lot of despair, desperation, and violence. In the future, people will almost certainly be increasingly reliant on technology to ward off any number of possible apocalypses, and this dependence will continue to generate more potential disaster. The image that comes to mind is that of the buffoon who, after imprudently generating a large mess in another person's home, hastily tidies up a messy room by stuffing all the piles of clutter higher and higher into a tiny closet, and as he attempts to shut the flimsy door on the bulging tower of clutter, it all comes crashing down on top of him, leaving him buried under the avalanche of his own shortsightedness. Addressing the problems we currently face that were generated by our prior use of technology (this includes the vast majority of congenital and non-congenital health issues) with more technology is like fending off the effects of withdrawal from alcohol addiction by imbibing more alcohol--as I've stated before, stealing from the future to pay for today. Every time we examine the present, we find that we are actually more embattled, more imperiled, by increasingly complex, nigh-impossible to solve problems--the consequences of previous technological (thus, counter-natural) solutions. It makes little difference whether a contemporary problem has its roots in a technology adopted ten thousand years ago or ten weeks ago--throwing more technology at it will just wind up compounding the overall problem. Therefore, the sooner technology is abandoned, the lighter the consequences we will have to suffer. If we feel that the death of the majority of people on the planet and the radioactive poisoning of the biosphere for centuries to come following the abandoning of technology now are intolerable, then how much more terrifying, how much more irresponsible would it be, to keep on going using technology to fix technology, until it all inevitably collapses anyway? The definition of an unsustainable system is that it will eventually collapse. The way things are looking, this collapse is likely coming very, very soon. Therefore, the people who believe that staying the course with technology means avoiding unnecessary calamity are deluding themselves. They have absolutely no concept of where all these threats to life on Earth come from, but they are taught, and they have faith, that no matter what, technology will offer a solution. As anarcho-primitivists, we should probably aspire to be a little better than such blind faith and face up to reality. Many, many people will suffer in the coming years, but this has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we forgo industrial technology.

I'll liken civilization to an out-of-control train. The wheels of the coming train crash were set in motion quite a few millennia ago, and there simply aren't any brakes. People feel that making the train go faster should get us all to safety, but they are ignoring all warning signs that speak to the contrary. We primitivists are advocating cutting our losses and jumping off, risking bumps, bruises, broken limbs, even death--but the alternative is even greater suffering when this train finally does crash. Not everyone is able-bodied enough to make the jump off the train--but primitivists didn't want those folks to have to be on the train, nor did they want a train in the first place. The longer this train is kept running through the efforts of the civilized world, the more vulnerable and dependent people will be born on it, the more hostages the train can boast. If the critics of anarcho-primitivism are so concerned with solving the problems of the world, why, then, do they fervently embrace the use of technology, a tactic that historically has only ever escalated all our crises over the long term? This irrational behavior parallels that of animals infected with rabies--infected animals, of course, are dangerous, threaten the rest of the population, and can never be reformed or cured, but can only be isolated or put down. Because primitivists recognize that there can be no resolution to the many crises of civilization by technical means, only a conscious decision to not exacerbate and further perpetuate them, we are denounced for supposedly advocating genocide. We absolutely should not be cowed by these asinine accusations, but instead point out the glaring hypocrisy and irony of such glib and weak critiques. How should one respond to the indignant wheel-chair bound, the diabetics, the hypertensive, the genetically predisposed, the premature births, and the rest when they accuse us of ableism? It's very simple: ask them how they justify bringing others down via the greater intensity of resource consumption, exploitation of habitat, pollution from industrial processes, and general infliction of very real harm, most egregiously to the poor, rural, and non-domesticated (once again, human and non-human alike) inhabitants of the rest of the world, who seem to be to them utterly invisible, to maintain their own lifestyles, effectively sacrificing many to support their few. How do they justify risking the ruin of the entire biosphere and the possibility for any life on this planet just so that they can personally exist? I am sure they will feel offended and shocked, but what about the victims of their industrial needs, whose voices are almost never heard as their lives, cultures, and histories are torn apart at an ever increasing rate in order to make our insular societies more accommodating to the privileged disabled and ill? If it comes down to a response of, "Well, better them than me", "Who gives a shit about some aborigines or Bangladeshis", or something of that nature, I'm sure we would find our sympathy for their indignant victimhood quickly evaporating. The only way to resolve any of the crises facing the world is to let things run their natural course. The truth is, almost none of us coming out of civilization are "able-bodied" enough to make it in a totally wild environment. Where are our tribes, where are our elders who can teach us the ways of survival and pass on important knowledge about the world? We've been left stranded inside civilization, cut off from the Dao, already watching our current way of life implode. Let's be honest. If you consider yourself disabled, then civilization is your enemy, not anarcho-primitivism. If you take the side of your enemy, you are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Our one and only hope of surviving the consequences of our own past indiscretions is to step back and allow nature to reassert dominance in whatever way, be it "genocidal" or "ableist", she deems fit. Nature--Dao--is the final arbiter in deciding what is appropriate for all life.

The Spider Eaters

"Many historic lessons were obtained through tremendous sacrifice. Such as eating food – if something is poisonous, we all seem to know it. It is common sense. But in the past many people must have eaten this food and died so that now we know better. Therefore I think the first person who ate crabs was admirable. If not a hero, who would dare eat such creatures? Since someone ate crabs, others must have eaten spiders as well. However, they were not tasty. So afterwards people stopped eating them. These people also deserve our heartfelt gratitude."--Lu Xun

Can people learn from the mistakes of the past, avoid repeating them, even if they have no direct experience of the negative consequences that had originally resulted? Apparently, there are some who would say, "no". In particular, I refer to those who argue that the goal of abolishing high technology is futile, that the pursuit of high technology is an inborn human quality, inseparable from our natural curiosity, and that the advent of high technology (and civilization) has always been, and will always be, inevitable. Even should technology be somehow banished, it would just start back up again sooner or later, because that's supposedly what people do. Even Ted Kaczynski conceded that, even should his goal of abolishing organization-dependent technology succeed, the possibility of people one day resurrecting old or innovating new technology cannot be prevented. Many go so far as to state that this technological drive is precisely what defines us as human, distinguishes us from the lower animals, and separates us from nature. To these people, to arrest progress is to arrest our humanity. However, even some of those who see the fatal nature of our current technological trajectories believe that such destruction is inevitable. Humans may be destroying themselves and their planet with technology, but we simply can't help it, it's hardwired in, we're just too damn good with technology, and the planet is just too damn fragile to accommodate our highly evolved ways, and no matter how many chances you give people to start over, we will inevitably take up the pursuit of progress, again and again--so their thinking goes. One wonders if this line of thought is an effort at self-delusion, an attempt to abscond from responsibility, or merely resignation to the planet's seeming fate. Whatever it is, it is demonstrably absurd. 

All of our ancestors, including all our non-human kin, have had to learn from mistakes in order to persist. To take Lu Xun's example, some of our ancestors tried to eat crabs and were lucky, and to this day we eat crabs, not because each one of us has had to discover the edibility of these creatures on our own, but because that knowledge became part of our inherited culture, and everyone just knows that crabs are good eating. Likewise, there must have been some who attempted to eat spiders, but without the same degree of success; nevertheless, the discovery that spiders are not edible and should be avoided became an equally important piece of knowledge that contributed to human cultures and, as Lu Xun rightly points out, the unfortunate spider eaters should also be acknowledged for their contribution to our collective cultural legacies as much as the crab eaters--and in traditional myths and stories, they are, albeit in symbolic characterization. Because there were spider eaters hundreds of thousands of years ago, there don't have to be any today, thanks to cultural knowledge. We don't have to keep experiencing mistakes firsthand, but rather, we have the very human ability to benefit from received wisdom, coded in our cultures, regarding all aspects of life: food--its acquisition, preparation, distribution, consumption; relationships--to your family, your band, the water, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the plants, the myriad life forms, and the spirits; appearance--coif, bodily decoration, clothing, posture, and facial expressions; manufacturing tools and other items; and, just as importantly, taboos--the things you should not say, think, do, consume, touch, or feel. Of course, this information is not simply presented as a set of rules to people, who are expected to abide by them unquestioningly. At the same time, it is impractical to explain your entire culture by citing specific past events that illustrate why it is okay to eat crabs and not spiders, why you can sleep with someone from a different family but not your cousin, and so on. As one might expect, people developed storytelling to lend context to their customs, giving reasons for their particular culture's codes of behavior in a way that was simultaneously compact, digestible, memorizable, and, perhaps most importantly, entertaining. 

Back in industrial civilization, we have made for ourselves a veritable buffet of different cultures from which we are more or less free to pick: we can have our Yoga classes, Zen meditation, African dancing, Brazilian martial arts, Sichuanese cuisine, and whiskey from Scotland, consuming as much "culture" as we'd like--and yet, we are unable to incorporate very much of our samplings into anything resembling a cohesive, stable culture of our own. We are just vampires, hungry for the blood of living cultures. Western societies more or less consciously abandoned their ties to ancestral knowledge during the Great Enlightenment, when Europeans intentionally rejected what they considered superstition in favor of new, rational knowledge. In essence, they doubted the stories of the past and decided to try eating spiders for themselves. So it has gone, for over half a millennium, that we have stubbornly tried to eat spiders in contradiction with received knowledge, ignoring all the poison that has been building up as a result, just to prove to ourselves that we do not have to be bound by the ignorant traditions of our embarrassingly basic progenitors. We have become so estranged from culture in the true sense, have worked so conscientiously to jettison it, that we no longer understand what its original purpose was: to spare people, out of love for one's own future generations, the difficult sacrifices, risks, mistakes, and regrets that our predecessors had to make before their culture held the guidance needed to help them make better choices. For our own future generations, would it not be possible to teach them, as a part of their culture, as a part of their identity, that technology was a grave mistake not to ever be repeated, and to have this traditional knowledge passed on to their children, grandchildren, and so on, the same exact way that humans have done since time immemorial? Can our future cultures not proclaim boldly, "We are the people. We do not eat spiders. That is not our way."?

 

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

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