Losing Our Place

Place is the ultimate source of culture.  The local environment—the local climate, geography, flora, fauna—sets the parameters regarding the specific behaviors required for survival.  Culture is merely(!) the historical organization and elaboration of these behaviors over time, and the assimilation and adaptation of these behaviors by people living in different places. 

Obviously this is a gross oversimplification. 

My point is simply to reference the foundational role the local environment has played in human culture.  Culture is grounded in the physical world, and the ways we negotiate the demands of life in specific places.  

But all that is long past.  Our connection to place is rapidly dissolving.  Modern “culture” forces us into lifestyles that are increasingly untethered from the local world.  My food comes from 1500 miles away.  My children are forced to move to other time zones to find employment.  Events in China have a direct impact on my economic well-being.  The quality of the air I breathe is controlled by lawyers and lobbyists for corporations headquartered in the Cayman Islands          

As citizens of a culturally-diluted global society, we are losing our sense of place.  We are rapidly becoming a race of beings who don’t know where we belong in the world.  What that really means for us, I’m not sure.

I do know that it is a serious problem, and that the problem lies somewhere in our willingness to buy into the meme, our willingness to see ourselves as members of an abstract global system rather than as individual human beings living in a concrete physical world.  

Are Humans Still Evolving?

A potential argument against the anarcho-primitivist agenda is that humans are no longer the same physical beings that we once were.   Researchers have found evidence of numerous genetic changes that have occurred in the last several thousand years, many of which have occurred within just the last five millennia.  Our DNA has apparently been altered by civilization.  Some scientists go so far as to suggest that civilization itself is a result of critical changes in our DNA.  Either way, we have evolved beyond our foraging ancestors and can no longer be expected to flourish as hunter-gatherers.

There are numerous things wrong with this argument—not the least of which is the implication that evolution is progressive.  Here’s just one other minor problem:

Anyone who claims that humans have evolved within the last 5-10 thousand years is limiting their definition of “human” to exclude the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand and other groups of people who have until recently been living in isolation from the populations of Africa, Asia, and Europe—an isolation that predates the agricultural revolution.  If we include Australian aborigines, then the changes in human DNA being cited as evidence of recent human evolution are really just changes in the DNA of subpopulations of humans, and represent fluctuations in the genetic variability between subpopulations (which happens all the time in virtually all species), not changes in humans as a species.  And the changes we are talking about are really not all that substantial.  I suspect that there are far more profound genetic differences between poodles and cocker spaniels. 

And, further, I would argue that the (relatively) recent changes in human DNA are a result of artificial selection, not natural selection.  They are side-effects of the “domestication” of the human species. 

And as far as the question of whether our changing DNA prevents us from flourishing in the absence of civilization’s oppressive omnipresence, it is perhaps most informative to note the seamless ease with which highly trained domestic dogs revert to their pack-scavenging ways when given the opportunity.           

In Search of an Organic Herbicide for Corporate Weeds

In the late 1970s, a Japanese farmer by the name of Mansanobu Fukuoka wrote The One Straw Revolution.  Fukuoka’s book—really a manifesto—presents an approach to organic farming that can serve as a powerful model for a commonsense approach to living in general.  He calls his method “do-nothing” farming.  It is based on the premise that working with the land’s evolved natural propensities can ultimately yield far superior results compared to modern farming with its monoculture and its labor-intensive environmentally destructive techniques.  Modern industrial farming attempts to force nature, or impose an artificial structure on the natural world.  Fields are plowed and planted with crops that need to be fertilized because the soil’s ability to sustain growth has been destroyed by the cultivation itself.  Herbicides are then applied to keep the “weeds” at bay.  All of this requires an enormous amount of human and natural resources.  Fukuoka’s do-nothing approach is simply to scatter seed on an existing uncultivated field.  Along with the desired crop, “weeds” of a certain type are planted to keep other weeds in check.  The straw from one harvest is allowed to sit on the field and decompose naturally even as the next season’s crop is being sown.  After a few seasons, the field is producing almost as much as a commercially cultivated and chemically treated field—but without either the cultivation or the chemicals.  The plants are healthier, and there is a net improvement in the soil season by season.  Even poor land and depleted soil can be resurrected by his methods. 

Fukuoka’s do-nothing approach to farming has something important to offer us, something more than mere metaphor.  Industrial civilization forces us to live in an unnatural, highly “cultivated” manner, and by living in this way we destroy our environment in the same way that plants forced to live in industrial monoculture exhaust the soil.  And, as with the crops of industrial agriculture, it takes an enormous amount of energy and resources to maintain our lifestyle because we are being forced to live in conditions that run counter to our evolved propensities.  Fukuoka’s solution is to stop the machines, let the soil and the plants do what they have been designed to do through several hundred million years of evolutionary fine-tuning.  Likewise, the solution to restoring our environment is to stop the machine of civilization, stop forcing our lives into conformity with an artificial and inhuman mode of being.  Out of civilization’s remains will eventually emerge fertile social and ecological “soil” for nurturing all of our human needs.  The problem will be one of stopping the cultivators, putting an end to the mechanical disturbance, and then having the patience to allow the dust to settle. 

The Psychology of Wage Labor

A coworker overheard me bemoaning the small stature of my paycheck and took it upon himself to set my perspective right by reminding me that I am earning more than most people in our part of the state.  I really have no right to complain, he said.

My response was to smile and walk away.  I do not usually feel compelled to calibrate my coworkers’ distorted perspectives. 

If I did, I would have told him that that way of thinking is completely backward.  Instead of being happy that I don’t have it as bad as some others, I should be incensed that others have it worse than I do!  Who benefits from my complacency?  Whose interests are being served if I am content to “count my blessings”? 

Having a substantial portion of the population unemployed or underemployed serves a dual purpose: it keeps wages low and, by tapping into our sense of just-world fairness, it keeps us from demanding to be paid what we feel our labor is actually worth.

Of course, the real issue is the insanity of the capitalist frame that allows us to assign monetary value to labor in the first place.

Dress Rehearsal

Iraq has served as a training ground for urban warfare.  The same tactics used for fighting insurgents in Baghdad will work just as well against those who dare challenge the corporate machine (the corporate media will call them terrorists) in Chicago and Denver and Seattle and Atlanta and Indianapolis and… 

Iraq has also introduced the general public to the idea of private security forces.  Corporate interests working through governments can enlist the services of corporate militias to impose the corporate will.  With the economy in the tank, it’s only a matter of time before the local police are privatized.  The government-to-private transition is already well underway in the penal system.

And Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan are field test sites for aerial hunter-killer robots.  How soon before the buzz of Predator drones fills the sky over Los Angeles?  Of course it will be for our own safety and protection.     

Beware of Ceremony

Ceremony is an attempt to infuse the trivial with meaning and importance.  If the circumstances being celebrated were intrinsically relevant, they would not require a public spectacle.  Ceremony is one of the earliest forms of thought control.  It is a tool used to homogenize the beliefs of individuals and align them with the goals of the power elite.

Destroying the Genie's Bottle

Dehumanizing technology doesn’t just happen.  Face-recognition surveillance systems, genetically altered salmon, and smart bombs are not inevitable results of the accumulation of knowledge, simple data points marking our progress, milestones on an upward path of ever increasing sophistication with respect to our ability to make and use tools.  Dehumanizing technology emerges from within a complex infrastructure that itself is designed—on every facet and at every level—to maximize exploitation, exploitation of the natural world, exploitation of human behavior, exploitation of the residue of previous exploitation.  And any new technology that emerges from within this infrastructure serves to enhance the capacity to exploit.      

The technology that emerges from within the global corporate industrial machine is not designed to promote human (or any other creature’s) wellbeing.  It doesn’t come into existence through the remote labor and insight of really smart people struggling alone to overcome specific problems in order to improve the human condition.  It comes into existence as a function of the operation of the machine itself.  It is not designed to service human ends.  It is designed to service the ends of the global corporate industrial machine.  And in almost every single case, technological “innovation” leads to the impoverishment of human experience. 

This is perhaps most obvious with electronic distraction technology, things such as cell phones and iPhones and high definition television, things that isolate us and insulate us from the world even as they provide us with an illusion of integration and connectivity.  But even something as superficially beneficial as pharmaceutical tech enfeebles us by increasing our dependency on the corporate machine and weakening our bodies’ natural coping mechanisms.

More to the point, the technology that emerges from the machine is not the result of our species’ natural developmental progression.  It is a byproduct of industrial civilization—our specific version of industrial civilization, a version that reflects countless accidents of history and geography.  It is a heinous and unnatural beast that needs to be destroyed before it destroys everything else.

Interesting: the archetypical genie bottle would make an ideal Molotov cocktail.    

Rebottling the Genie

Djinn are powerful inhabitants of Islamic cosmology who were made from smokeless fire.  They are the only beings in Allah’s creation other than humans to possess free will.

Smokeless fire?  Electricity?  If artificial intelligence is allowed to continue along its present developmental trajectory, perhaps the Djinn will reemerge from the sands of Arabic mythology to inhabit the silicone of electronic circuitry.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, or so the cliché goes.  You can’t reverse technological “progress” once it has happened.  And, besides, who would want to?  Who would want to go back to a world without cell phones and robotic aircraft and video pornography on demand?  Who would want to go back to a world without touch screens and debit cards and airport body scanners?  Who would want to go back to a world with an intact ozone layer and thriving ecosystems?  Who besides a muddle-headed anarcho-primitivist would want to go back to a time when life was a direct, unmediated, human experience?          

Maybe it’s true.  Maybe we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  But that doesn’t mean that we are doomed to live as helpless, dehumanized victims of our own technology.  Just because we can’t put the genie back doesn't mean that we can't destroy the bottle.

The Cult of Expertise (Part 1)

The life of a “primitive” is perilous.  There are dangers lurking in every tree, under every rock.  Life in the modern world is no less perilous, although the dangers are less salient, perhaps.  There is danger lurking in every egg processing plant, in every corporate boardroom.  The air we breathe, the water we drink, the factory farmed food we eat, the buildings we occupy, the appliances we interact with, the political alliances our leaders forge are all potentially deadly.   

The difference between the two, the primitive and the modern, is that the former is personally equipped to face the danger; he has the weapons and the physical constitution—and the knowledge—to protect himself and his family.  He may not always be successful, but he always has the power to act in his own best interests.

That is not the case with the victims of civilization.  As an individual, I have very little power over daily threats to my existence.  I have no control over the levels of toxins released in the air and water.  I have no control over the side effects of the genetic alteration of my food.  I have no control over oil spills or nuclear accidents or plane crashes or levee failures.  How much mercury is safe to eat?  How many highway deaths are acceptable?  I have been trained from a very early age to acquiesce to the opinions of experts and to the demands of people who have been granted the power to make decisions.  And there are laws and regulations and policies—and people with badges and guns—to ensure that I continue in my acquiescence.  I have no choice.  I have no real control.  And the knowledge I am allowed to exercise is restricted to my own slice of specialization.  

Specialization and division of labor is the hallmark of civilization.  A sense of personal power and control is the hallmark of psychological adjustment.  There is an inverse relationship between personal control and specialization, which suggests that psychological adjustment and civilization are mutually incompatible. 

Words Are Not Enough

Don’t look now, but something is happening to the language of dissent.

Hyperbole has historically played a starring role in partisan political commentary, with only a rare cameo appearance in mainstream news coverage.  There is something about the language of extremes that seems at odds with objective, just-the-facts-ma’am reporting.  In recent years, however, perhaps due in large part to Fox News, hyperbole has found an increasingly welcome home in the mainstream.  

Maybe the increasing use of hyperbole simply reflects an attempt to be heard over the pandemonium of a Youtube-Twitter-Facebook cacophony, to be noticed against an ever-expanding backdrop of instant infotainment where all but the most extreme and most outrageous is ignored.  

Whatever the reasons, a side effect is that the words and expressions that we use to describe extremes are being divested of their capacity to have an emotional impact.  Words such as tragedy and catastrophe are applied with equal descriptive power to a minor irritation such as a traffic jam, a statistical blip in the stock market, and the plight of an Afghani father whose children were vaporized in the night by a US Predator Drone attack. 

As potential weapons in the battle against the machine, words are losing their cutting edge.  The language of dissent is being worn down, dulled, blunted. 

Language is still an important weapon in the arsenal of revolution.  But words alone are not enough.  They never have been.  Dissent needs to be action-based—we are not going to talk the corporate machine into pieces.