Civilization is not a genetic disease

Mother culture provides several cleverly crafted ways of deflecting questions directed at the validity of her narratives.  Deep questioning of the status quo is a form of insanity.  Those who would question the legitimacy of civilization are clearly in need of psychiatric attention.  Those who would write a blog echoing the suggestion that we need to end civilization intentionally before it crashes on top of us are insane but harmless: the caricature of the lunatic marching in the street with the sign reading “the end is near.”  It’s important that anyone who suggests dismantling the status quo is made to appear crazy and at the same time irrelevant.  Any attempts to engage in rational discourse with civilization’s apologists are met with knee-jerk retorts that assume the form of rational rejoinder: “We need civilization” or “Civilization does more good than harm.”  And from those who acknowledge that civilization has generated some serious problems, we often hear variations on: “With the right changes, we can make the system work” or “Our technology will eventually solve our problems.” Lurking behind all of these is the assumption that civilization is part of what it means to be human, that it is inevitable and thus the problems it creates are unavoidable.

Civilization is not coded in our DNA!   

The fact that industrial civilization exists means that it is compatible with our evolved capacities (at least in the short term); but compatible does not mean inevitable.  Civilization depends on our evolved mnemonic and linguistic faculties and our ability to represent the world symbolically, along with our willingness to engage an artificial world of abstract reified entities.  But that does not make civilization obligatory any more than Nike corporation is a natural outgrowth of bipedal locomotion. 

In Avoiding Today's Pain, We Ensure Tomorrow's Agony

“It is too late to stop now.  Industrial civilization has developed gargantuan inertia.  Change is painful; the average person will not be willing to accept the pain.  The average person will fight to the death to keep their corporate shackles firmly in place.”

It is true that dismantling civilization is going to be inconceivably painful.  There is no way around that.  It will involve a magnitude of change beyond that of the most devastating natural disaster.  It will involve a disruption in the predictability of daily life currently experienced only by people living in active war zones.  As I write this, the media are reporting on the displaced fishermen and others in the Gulf of Mexico, struggling to come to grips with the loss of their livelihood as oil continues to gush from the ocean floor.  For many of them, the mere loss of connection with industrial civilization, the loss of their role, their place in the gears of the machine, their ability to continue to consume, is devastating to the point of suicide.   Imagine what will happen when civilization itself dissolves.

Wars, natural disasters—or greedy-oil-company-generated disasters, as the case may be—however, are not good models for what will happen as civilization starts to disintegrate.  First, regardless of the magnitude of suffering, wars, earthquakes, and oil spills remain local disturbances.  The global corporate infrastructure is unaffected by localized human or environmental tragedy.  Second, their impact beyond the very short term is largely restricted to the poor and powerless.  This is clearly evident in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and in the wake of hurricane Katrina.  Then there is Somalia and Afghanistan and [insert your impoverished war torn nation of choice here], where the daily loss of human life is not granted even the courtesy of a dismissive shrug in the west.  Also, despite their long lasting impact on the local people and environment, they are nonetheless seen as temporary, ephemeral catastrophes that evaporate into the dark mists of memory after a few news cycles.

The disintegration of industrial civilization will not have a limited local or temporal impact.  And, not only will it not be restricted to the poor and powerless, it will erase entirely the distinction between rich and poor, powerful and powerless.  It will not be the kind of change that leaves any residual hope (or, eventually, desire) for a return to what industrial civilization calls normality.  

To say that dismantling civilization will be painful doesn’t even begin to cover it.  That people will resist is only human nature.  That some will be willing to die fighting for the right to continue live a dehumanizing existence is also human nature—how many slaves have willingly forfeited their lives in service of their masters over the centuries?

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When it comes to pain, maybe we have three choices.  We can rip the bandage off as quickly as possible, and endure the intense but transient sting.  Or we can slowly peal it off, stretching the pain out, slicing it into small but manageable pieces.  Or we can let the wound remain under the bandage, festering and septic from lack of exposure to the healing air, until we lose the limb to gangrene. 

Bomb Your Local Walmart

There is no chance of winning the fight against the corporate machine by playing by the rules because the game itself is designed to assert the interests of corporations over those of human beings. 

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to remove an existing Walmart from your local neighborhood.  Walmarts are extremely difficult pests to exterminate once they have become established.  Because they are so effective at displacing their competition, they quickly become the only neighborhood source of many “essential” consumer products.  They also (marginally) employ a number of local people, which feeds the illusion that they are good for the local economy—despite the fact that the lion’s share of their take is siphoned away from the local economy and exported out of state, and the fact that their displaced competition represented more and better-paying local jobs.  Needless to say, you are not going to remove Walmart by circulating petitions and attending city counsel meetings.

Walmart is clearly not in your best interest—both as an individual human and as a public citizen.  But Walmart is a corporation, and is thus protected as a rightful being by the entire weight of the US legal system and the entire might of US law enforcement, and so unless you are a billionaire you have very little power that you can wield—if you play by the rules.

We need another term.  It’s not terrorism if the target of your violence is incapable of experiencing the human emotion of fear.  It’s not terrorism if you are trying to eliminate something that is itself a source of planet-wide terror.  Emancipationism?  Freedomism? 

Re-humanizationism?

Old Dog Don Quixote

There is a large wind farm going up a few miles down the road from where I live.  The windmills are massive steel structures, perhaps 165 tons each.  And they are transported in large pieces that take up two lanes of highway.  When the farm is completed, there will be literally hundreds of them.  In addition, there is an extensive network of towers being erected to transport the power—hundreds of steel towers and uncountable miles of wire. 

It’s my understanding that steel is fairly energy-intensive to produce.

One web site reports that it costs 30,000 a year to maintain a single windmill, and that they have about a 20-25 year lifespan.  In addition to the energy necessary for maintenance (cost and energy are not equivalent), how much energy does it take to produce the steel, and fabricate, transport, and assemble the parts?  And the wire?  And the towers?  I assume the towers and wire have a finite lifespan as well.

Will a windmill be able to provide enough energy over its lifespan to produce its replacement?  Or will its replacement also be manufactured in coal powered steel mills and transported by diesel powered trucks and assembled with diesel powered cranes (the cranes and trucks also manufactured in coal powered plants)?  

Are wind farms (and solar farms and etc.) a real solution to any of our energy problems?  Or are they just another way of accelerating the rate at which the industrial machine is consuming the planet?  

Big Brother on the Road

OnStar, a wholly-owned subsidiary of General Motors, Inc., is billed as an innovative vehicle safety and security system.  It consists of an onboard computer GPS system networked into the car’s systems and equipped with the ability to transmit and receive data.  It can automatically call for help when you have an accident.  It can even make hotel reservations and check your email for you.  If your car is stolen, the system allows the police to pinpoint the location of your car and engage an ignition block preventing the car from starting until they get to the scene.

Interesting.  And this is supposed to make me feel safe.

The OnStar system is (theoretically) capable of providing a permanent record of all the places you have driven your car, the routes you took along with the specific dates and times, should anyone be interested in that information.  But I’m sure no one would ever be interested in that information.  I’m sure that as long as you don’t do or say anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. 

But wait.  Suppose your car isn’t stolen.  Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you are an activist protesting the corporate status quo, and that someone in a position of power has taken issue with your protestations to the point that they want to have you silenced.  You sense that it is time for you to lay low for awhile, so you get in your car to drive to your sister’s place to hide out for a few weeks.  But for some reason, your car won’t start…

Compartmentalization

Humans are an adaptive species, and we have acquired a variety of psychological coping mechanisms to help us as we attempt to deal with the dramatic mismatch between our DNA and the demands of corporate civilization.  The ability to compartmentalize is one such mechanism. Compartmentalization involves the restriction of our scope of thought and awareness so that it encompasses manageable amounts of internally-consistent information.  By compartmentalizing, we are able to erect conceptual boundaries separating incongruent or conflicting features of experience.  As a too-common example, consider the environmental activist who nonetheless commutes several miles to work each day and continues to purchase innumerable products that are energy-intensive and ecologically corrosive to produce and dispose of.  Or, closer to home, consider the anarcho-primitivist who sits in his air conditioned office and uses a laptop computer to compose blog posts about the evils of technology and the need to unplug from civilization.  

When compartmentalization breaks down, it can lead to an uncomfortable psychological state known as cognitive dissonance.  When the person recognizes inconsistency in his or her beliefs, behaviors, or facets of experience, he or she employs one or more additional cognitive strategies in order to reduce the dissonance.  For example, the anarcho-primitivist might rationalize his use of technology by claiming that sometimes it is necessary to fight fire with fire, or that he is trying in his small way to facilitate the destruction of the machine from the inside, as a monkey-wrench in the gears, etc.  I’m not quite sure how environmental activists rationalize simultaneously protesting and participating in the destruction of the planet.

Human Evolution in Perspective

Imagine a football field in which the distance from the visiting team’s goal line to the last four-fifths of an inch prior to the home team’s goal line represents human existence prior to the industrial revolution.  Or, to invoke a structural metaphor, imagine a large multistory Victorian style house in which the foundation, the framing, the floors, the walls, the fixtures, the insulation, and the original siding represent the evolutionary history of our species up to the onset of domestication just prior to the agricultural revolution.  The remainder of our species’ history would be equivalent to a layer of vinyl siding tacked over the top, with mass technology represented by a thin veneer of paint over the top of that.  The siding plays no role in the structural integrity of the house—and even less so, the paint. 

But four-fifths of an inch can mean the difference between a touchdown and losing the game entirely!

The Illusion of Inevitability

 

Civilization is anything but inevitable.  Its occurrence is in fact one of the greatest mysteries of the human situation.  The fact that civilization accounts for less than one percent of human existence means that it is not one of our species’ defining features.  It is a quirk, an accident of geography or climate or viral invention, or some unlikely combination of circumstance. 

It is important that we divest ourselves of the teleological illusion that civilization is a natural outcome of our evolution, because until we do, we will continue to accept civilization and all of its concomitant suffering as natural and unavoidable, as part of the price we pay for being what we are. 

The meme of inevitability is repeated constantly in the media.  It is especially salient in discussions of technology and technological “advancement” (what, I wonder, is the ability to evaporate Afghani children with a robotic aircraft piloted by someone drinking Mountain Dew in an air conditioned trailer in Colorado an advancement toward?).  It is also seen in the laissez faire approach to corporate exploitation, complete acquiescence to corporate privilege, and the unquestioned assumption that “needs” of corporate entities supersede the (real) needs of individual persons.  The media propagate a malignant acceptance of the deterioration of the natural world even as they gleefully report on the latest environmental catastrophe, species extinction, climate change estimate, or industrial toxin.  It’s just the price of progress, after all.

“Progress is inevitable.  Can’t you see? It’s right there in the word progress!”

And for those few who do actually see, for those of us who are beginning to understand what we are really up against, the illusion of inevitability too often gets reinforcement from its most deadly ally: learned helplessness. 

And so we have a battle on two fronts: once we conquer the illusion that the status quo is inevitable, we must find some way to convince ourselves that, against some very convincing indications to the contrary, we nonetheless have the power to change it.  

Birds

 

Our psychology, like our physiology, has evolved for a lifestyle embedded in nature, a nature with which the average hostage of the western world has only very indirect contact.

   

Author/psychotherapist Chellis Glendinning claims that we are all suffering from the multifarious effects of post-traumatic stress generated by the large disconnect between our genetic preparation and the requirements of life in industrial society. In recent decades, some psychologists have begun to call themselves ecopsychologists and incorporate the natural world into their treatment of mental disorders, an approach to psychotherapy known as ecotherapy.   Ecotherapy is based on the idea that many if not most of our modern mental health problems result at least in part from a detachment (estrangement, alienation) from the natural world. The only route to a permanent cure is to somehow reintegrate ourselves with nature. 

There is a problem with this, of course.  The natural world no longer exists in anything resembling the natural world our DNA expects: the land, the waterways, the air, the food we eat, the animals we have contact with, the way we partition our days and years have all been irrevocably altered.  So we are doomed to live with the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, symptoms that are bound to intensify with each generation as the natural world continues to recede from our awareness.

Even now, I sit with my face bathed in the artificial glow of a computer screen, in an office where the only natural creatures are a couple of tropical plants in pots on the windowsill and a spider hidden in the recess between the bookcase and the wall.

Wait.  There is something else.  So ubiquitous as to be unnoticed: birds singing their hearts out in the courtyard beyond my small windows.  Birdsong may be one of the very last vestiges of wild nature to which city-dwellers have daily exposure.

Birds.

If ecopsychology has any validity then it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the potential importance of these feathery survivors of the late cretaceous.  And I am starting to wonder at the subliminal sustenance they may be providing for my sanity at this very moment.

Civilization is an Equal Opportunity Exploitation Machine

That doesn’t mean that all people have equal access to civilization’s accoutrements—some groups have seeming unlimited access while others are marginalized into insignificance—but all are equally alienated from their humanity. 

The rich, the famous, the powerful are presented as a kind of model so that the poor, the anonymous, the powerless masses are able to maintain the necessary sense of direction, the necessary illusion of hierarchy.  It is hard to appreciate the depth of your suffering if everyone else is suffering the same.  And it is important for a society based on consumptive acquisition that the majority of its members feel an acute sense of deficiency. 

But the rich, the famous, the powerful have exchanged what little freedom there is left available to us for their riches, their fame, their power.  They are, for all their apparent “success” more deeply embedded in the gears—they are, in fact, the gears.  As gears, their movement is only through direct transfer from the springs and gears around them.  A homeless person living under a freeway overpass has inestimably more freedom of thought and movement, is inestimably more human.  The homeless, because for many of them civilization is something they are living with more than something they are living in, are perhaps, along with their rainforest-dwelling brethren, the last remaining human beings on the planet.