[D66] The Primitivist Critique of Civilization

[R.O.]

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/critique.html

The Primitivist Critique of Civilization

by Richard Heinberg

A paper presented at the 24th annual meeting of the International 
Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations at Wright State 
University, Dayton, Ohio, June 15, 1995.

I. Prologue

Having been chosen--whether as devil's advocate or sacrificial lamb, I 
am not sure--to lead off this discussion on the question, "Was 
Civilization a Mistake?", I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts.

 From the viewpoint of any non-civilized person, this consideration 
would appear to be steeped in irony. Here we are, after all, some of the 
most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized 
way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of 
our fellow civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to 
being ironic, also disturbing and pointless: after all, what person who 
has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would relish the 
idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?

Nevertheless, despite the possibility that at least some of our remarks 
may be ironic, disturbing, and pointless, here we are. Why? I can only 
speak for myself. In my own intellectual development I have found that a 
critique of civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons.

The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern 
world. We are, it seems, killing the planet. Revisionist "wise use" 
advocates tell us there is nothing to worry about; dangers to the 
environment, they say, have been wildly exaggerated. To me this is the 
most blatant form of wishful thinking. By most estimates, the oceans are 
dying, the human population is expanding far beyond the long-term 
carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is disappearing, and the 
global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability. Unless drastic 
steps are taken, in fifty years the vast majority of the world's 
population will likely be existing in conditions such that the lifestyle 
of virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise by 
comparison.

Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the 
problems we face have to do with unique economic and historical 
circumstances. But we should at least consider the possibility that our 
modern industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go 
back quite far. This, at any rate, is the implication of recent 
assessments of the ecological ruin left in the wake of the Roman, 
Mesopotamian, Chinese, and other prior civilizations. Are we perhaps 
repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale?

If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its 
effects on the environment, the second has to do with its impact on 
human beings. As civilized people, we are also domesticated. We are to 
primitive peoples as cows and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the 
rental property where I live in California my landlord keeps two white 
domesticated ducks. These ducks have been bred to have wings so small as 
to prevent them from flying. This is a convenience for their keepers, 
but compared to wild ducks these are pitiful creatures.

Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too--though 
powerful and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They 
regard civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people 
appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug--a drug that 
comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. 
We are helpless without this drug, so we have come to see any threat to 
its supply as a threat to our very existence. Therefore we are easily 
manipulated--by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be 
taken away)--and powerful commercial and political interests have 
learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve their 
own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our 
drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological 
equivalents, we try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an 
intolerable double bind.

Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in 
its present form, it follows that our descendants will be living very 
differently in a few decades, whether their new way of life arises by 
conscious choice or by default. If humankind is to choose its path 
deliberately, I believe that our deliberations should include a critique 
of civilization itself, such as we are undertaking here. The question 
implicit in such a critique is, What have we done poorly or 
thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now? It is in this 
constructive spirit that I offer the comments that follow.

II. Civilization and Primitivism

What Is Primitivism?

The image of a lost Golden Age of freedom and innocence is at the heart 
of all the world's religions, is one of the most powerful themes in the 
history of human thought, and is the earliest and most characteristic 
expression of primitivism--the perennial belief in the necessity of a 
return to origins.

As a philosophical idea, primitivism has had as its proponents Lao Tze, 
Rousseau, and Thoreau, as well as most of the pre-Socratics, the 
medieval Jewish and Christian theologians, and 19th- and 20th-century 
anarchist social theorists, all of whom argued (on different bases and 
in different ways) the superiority of a simple life close to nature. 
More recently, many anthropologists have expressed admiration for the 
spiritual and material advantages of the ways of life of the world's 
most "primitive" societies--the surviving gathering-and-hunting peoples 
who now make up less than one hundredth of one percent of the world's 
population.

Meanwhile, as civilization approaches a crisis precipitated by 
overpopulation and the destruction of the ecological integrity of the 
planet, primitivism has enjoyed a popular resurgence, by way of 
increasing interest in shamanism, tribal customs, herbalism, radical 
environmentalism, and natural foods. There is a widespread (though by no 
means universally shared) sentiment that civilization has gone too far 
in its domination of nature, and that in order to survive--or, at least, 
to live with satisfaction--we must regain some of the spontaneity and 
naturalness of our early ancestors.

What Is Civilization?

There are many possible definitions of the word civilization. Its 
derivation--from civis, "town" or "city"--suggests that a minimum 
definition would be, "urban culture." Civilization also seems to imply 
writing, division of labor, agriculture, organized warfare, growth of 
population, and social stratification.

Yet the latest evidence calls into question the idea that these traits 
always go together. For example, Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky's 
assessment of power relations in the Mesopotamian city of Maskan-shapir 
(published in the April 1995 Scientific American) suggests that urban 
culture need not imply class divisions. Their findings seem to show that 
civilization in its earliest phase was free of these. Still, for the 
most part the history of civilization in the Near East, the Far East, 
and Central America, is also the history of kingship, slavery, conquest, 
agriculture, overpopulation, and environmental ruin. And these traits 
continue in civilization's most recent phases--the industrial state and 
the global market--though now the state itself takes the place of the 
king, and slavery becomes wage labor and de facto colonialism 
administered through multinational corporations. Meanwhile, the 
mechanization of production (which began with agriculture) is overtaking 
nearly every avenue of human creativity, population is skyrocketing, and 
organized warfare is resulting in unprecedented levels of bloodshed.

Perhaps, if some of these undesirable traits were absent from the very 
first cities, I should focus my critique on "Empire Culture" instead of 
the broader target of "civilization." However, given how little we still 
know about the earliest urban centers of the Neolithic era, it is 
difficult as yet to draw a clear distinction between the two terms.

III. Primitivism Versus Civilization

Wild Self/Domesticated Self

People are shaped from birth by their cultural surroundings and by their 
interactions with the people closest to them. Civilization manipulates 
these primary relationships in such a way as to domesticate the 
infant--that is, so as to accustom it to life in a social structure one 
step removed from nature. The actual process of domestication is 
describable as follows, using terms borrowed from the object-relations 
school of psychology.

The infant lives entirely in the present moment in a state of pure trust 
and guilelessness, deeply bonded with her mother. But as she grows, she 
discovers that her mother is a separate entity with her own priorities 
and limits. The infant's experience of relationship changes from one of 
spontaneous trust to one that is suffused with need and longing. This 
creates a gap between Self and Other in the consciousness of the child, 
who tries to fill this deepening rift with transitional 
objects--initially, perhaps a teddy bear; later, addictions and beliefs 
that serve to fill the psychic gap and thus provide a sense of security. 
It is the powerful human need for transitional objects that drives 
individuals in their search for property and power, and that generates 
bureaucracies and technologies as people pool their efforts.

This process does not occur in the same way in the case of primitive 
childbearing, where the infant is treated with indulgence, is in 
constant physical contact with a caregiver throughout infancy, and later 
undergoes rites of passage. In primal cultures the need for transitional 
objects appears to be minimized. Anthropological and psychological 
research converge to suggest that many of civilized people's emotional 
ills come from our culture's abandonment of natural childrearing methods 
and initiatory rites and its systematic substitution of alienating 
pedagogical practices from crib through university.

Health: Natural or Artificial?

In terms of health and quality of life, civilization has been a 
mitigated disaster. S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., et al., argued in The 
Paleolithic Prescription (1988) that pre agricultural peoples enjoyed a 
generally healthy way of life, and that cancer, heart disease, strokes, 
diabetes, emphysema, hypertension, and cirrhosis--which together lead to 
75 percent of all mortality in industrialized nations--are caused by our 
civilized lifestyles. In terms of diet and exercise, preagricultural 
lifestyles showed a clear superiority to those of agricultural and 
civilized peoples.

Much-vaunted increases in longevity in civilized populations have 
resulted not so much from wonder drugs, as merely from better 
sanitation--a corrective for conditions created by the overcrowding of 
cities; and from reductions in infant mortality. It is true that many 
lives have been spared by modern antibiotics. Yet antibiotics also 
appear responsible for the evolution of resistant strains of microbes, 
which health officials now fear could produce unprecedented epidemics in 
the next century.

The ancient practice of herbalism, evidence of which dates back at least 
60,000 years, is practiced in instinctive fashion by all higher animals. 
Herbal knowledge formed the basis of modern medicine and remains in many 
ways superior to it. In countless instances, modern synthetic drugs have 
replaced herbs not because they are more effective or safer, but because 
they are more profitable to manufacture.

Other forms of "natural" healing--massage, the "placebo effect," the use 
of meditation and visualization--are also being shown effective. Medical 
doctors Bernie Siegel and Deepak Chopra are critical of mechanized 
medicine and say that the future of the healing professions lies in the 
direction of attitudinal and natural therapies.

Spirituality: Raw or Cooked?

Spirituality means different things to different people--humility before 
a higher power or powers; compassion for the suffering of others; 
obedience to a lineage or tradition; a felt connection with the Earth or 
with Nature; evolution toward "higher" states of consciousness; or the 
mystical experience of oneness with all life or with God. With regard to 
each of these fundamental ways of defining or experiencing the sacred, 
spontaneous spirituality seems to become regimented, dogmatized, even 
militarized, with the growth of civilization. While some of the founders 
of world religions were intuitive primitivists (Jesus, Lao Tze, the 
Buddha), their followers have often fostered the growth of dominance 
hierarchies.

The picture is not always simple, though. The thoroughly civilized Roman 
Catholic Church produced two of the West's great primitivists--St. 
Francis and St. Clair; while the neo-shamanic, vegetarian, and herbalist 
movements of early 20th century Germany attracted arch-authoritarians 
Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Hitler. Of course, Nazism's militarism and 
rigid dominator organization were completely alien to primitive life, 
while St. Francis's and St. Clair's voluntary poverty and treatment of 
animals as sacred were reminiscent of the lifestyle and worldview of 
most gathering-and-hunting peoples. If Nazism was atavistic, it was only 
highly selectively so.

A consideration of these historical ironies is useful in helping us 
isolate the essentials of true primitivist spirituality--which include 
spontaneity, mutual aid, encouragement of natural diversity, love of 
nature, and compassion for others. As spiritual teachers have always 
insisted, it is the spirit (or state of consciousness) that is 
important, not the form (names, ideologies, and techniques). While from 
the standpoint of Teilhard de Chardin's idea of spiritual evolutionism, 
primitivist spirituality may initially appear anti-evolutionary or 
regressive, the essentials we have cited are timeless and 
trans-evolutionary--they are available at all stages, at all times, for 
all people. It is when we cease to see civilization in terms of theories 
of cultural evolution and see it merely as one of several possible forms 
of social organization that we begin to understand why religion can be 
liberating, enlightening, and empowering when it holds consistently to 
primitivist ideals; or deadening and oppressive when it is co-opted to 
serve the interests of power.

Economics: Free or Unaffordable?

At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with 
one another in the process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. 
In the most primitive societies, these relations are direct and 
straightforward. Land, shelter, and food are free. Everything is shared, 
there are no rich people or poor people, and happiness has little to do 
with accumulating material possessions. The primitive lives in relative 
abundance (all needs and wants are easily met) and has plenty of leisure 
time.

Civilization, in contrast, straddles two economic pillars--technological 
innovation and the marketplace. "Technology" here includes everything 
from the plow to the nuclear reactor--all are means to more efficiently 
extract energy and resources from nature. But efficiency implies the 
reification of time, and so civilization always brings with it a 
preoccupation with past and future; eventually the present moment nearly 
vanishes from view. The elevation of efficiency over other human values 
is epitomized in the factory--the automated workplace--in which the 
worker becomes merely an appendage of the machine, a slave to clocks and 
wages.

The market is civilization's means of equating dissimilar things through 
a medium of exchange. As we grow accustomed to valuing everything 
according to money, we tend to lose a sense of the uniqueness of things. 
What, after all, is an animal worth, or a mountain, or a redwood tree, 
or an hour of human life? The market gives us a numerical answer based 
on scarcity and demand. To the degree that we believe that such values 
have meaning, we live in a world that is desacralized and desensitized, 
without heart or spirit.

We can get some idea of ways out of our ecologically ruinous, humanly 
deadening economic cage by examining not only primitive lifestyles, but 
the proposals of economist E. F. Schumacher, the experiences of people 
in utopian communities in which technology and money are marginalized, 
and the lives of individuals who have adopted an attitude of voluntary 
simplicity.

Government: Bottom Up or Top Down?

In the most primitive human societies there are no leaders, bosses, 
politics, laws, crime, or taxes. There is often little division of labor 
between women and men, and where such division exists both gender's 
contributions are often valued more or less equally. Probably as a 
result, many foraging peoples are relatively peaceful (anthropologist 
Richard Lee found that "the !Kung [Bushmen of southern Africa] hate 
fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid").

With agriculture usually come division of labor, increased sexual 
inequality, and the beginnings of social hierarchy. Priests, kings, and 
organized, impersonal warfare all seem to come together in one package. 
Eventually, laws and borders define the creation of the fully fledged 
state. The state as a focus of coercion and violence has reached its 
culmination in the 19th and 20th centuries in colonialism, fascism, and 
Stalinism. Even the democratic industrial state functions essentially as 
an instrument of multinational corporate-style colonial oppression and 
domestic enslavement, its citizens merely being given the choice between 
selected professional bureaucrats representing political parties with 
slightly varying agendas for the advancement of corporate power.

Beginning with William Godwin in the early 19th century, anarchist 
social philosophers have offered a critical counterpoint to the 
increasingly radical statism of most of the world's civilized political 
leaders. The core idea of anarchism is that human beings are 
fundamentally sociable; left to themselves, they tend to cooperate to 
their mutual benefit. There will always be exceptions, but these are 
best dealt with informally and on an individual basis. Many anarchists 
cite the Athenian polis, the "sections" in Paris during the French 
Revolution, the New England town meetings of the 18th century, the 
popular assemblies in Barcelona in the late 1930s, and the Paris general 
strike of 1968 as positive examples of anarchy in action. They point to 
the possibility of a kind of social ecology, in which diversity and 
spontaneity are permitted to flourish unhindered both in human affairs 
and in Nature.

While critics continue to describe anarchism as a practical failure, 
organizational and systems theorists Tom Peters and Peter Senge are 
advocating the transformation of hierarchical, bureaucratized 
organizations into more decentralized, autonomous, spontaneous ones. 
This transformation is presently underway in--of all places--the very 
multinational corporations that form the backbone of industrial 
civilization.

Civilization and Nature

Civilized people are accustomed to an anthropocentric view of the world. 
Our interest in the environment is utilitarian: it is of value because 
it is of use (or potential use) to human beings--if only as a place for 
camping and recreation.

Primitive peoples, in contrast, tended to see nature as intrinsically 
meaningful. In many cultures prohibitions surrounded the overhunting of 
animals or the felling of trees. The aboriginal peoples of Australia 
believed that their primary purpose in the cosmic scheme of things was 
to take care of the land, which meant performing ceremonies for the 
periodic renewal of plant and animal species, and of the landscape itself.

The difference in effects between the anthropocentric and ecocentric 
worldviews is incalculable. At present, we human beings--while 
considering ourselves the most intelligent species on the planet--are 
engaged in the most unintelligent enterprise imaginable: the destruction 
of our own natural life-support system. We need here only mention 
matters such as the standard treatment of factory-farmed domesticated 
food animals, the destruction of soils, the pollution of air and water, 
and the extinctions of wild species, as these horrors are well 
documented. It seems unlikely that these could ever have arisen but for 
an entrenched and ever-deepening trend of thinking that separates 
humanity from its natural context and denies inherent worth to non-human 
nature.

The origin and growth of this tendency to treat nature as an object 
separate from ourselves can be traced to the Neolithic revolution, and 
through the various stages of civilization's intensification and growth. 
One can also trace the countercurrent to this tendency from the 
primitivism of the early Taoists to that of today's deep ecologists, 
ecofeminists, and bioregionalists.

How We Compensate for Our Loss of Nature
How do we make up for the loss of our primitive way of life? 
Psychotherapy, exercise and diet programs, the vacation and 
entertainment industries, and social welfare programs are necessitated 
by civilized, industrial lifestyles. The cumulative cost of these 
compensatory efforts is vast; yet in many respects they are only palliative.

The medical community now tells us that our modern diet of low-fiber, 
high-fat processed foods is disastrous to our health. But what exactly 
is the cost--in terms of hospital stays, surgeries, premature deaths, 
etc.? A rough but conservative estimate runs into the tens of billions 
of dollars per year in North America alone.

At the forefront of the "wellness" movement are advocates of natural 
foods, exercise programs (including hiking and backpacking), herbalism, 
and other therapies that aim specifically to bring overcivilized 
individuals back in touch with the innate source of health within their 
own stressed and repressed bodies.

Current approaches in psychology aim to retrieve lost portions of the 
primitive psyche via "inner child" work, through which adults compensate 
for alienated childhoods; or men's and women's vision quests, through 
which civilized people seek to access the "wild man" or "wild woman" within.

All of these physically, psychologically, and even spiritually-oriented 
efforts are helpful antidotes for the distress of civilization. One must 
wonder, however, whether it wouldn't be better simply to stop creating 
the problems that these programs and therapies are intended to correct.

IV. Questions and Objections

Isn't civilization simply the inevitable expression of the evolutionary 
urge as it is translated through human society? Isn't primitivism 
therefore regressive?
We are accustomed to thinking of the history of Western civilization as 
an inevitable evolutionary progression. But this implies that all the 
world's peoples who didn't spontaneously develop civilizations of their 
own were less highly evolved than ourselves, or simply "backward." Not 
all anthropologists who have spent time with such peoples think this 
way. Indeed, according to the cultural materialist school of thought, 
articulated primarily by Marvin Harris, social change in the direction 
of technological innovation and social stratification is fueled not so 
much by some innate evolutionary urge as by crises brought on by 
overpopulation and resource exhaustion.
Wasn't primitive life terrible? Would we really want to go back to 
hunting and gathering, living without modern comforts and conveniences?
Putting an urban person in the wilderness without comforts and 
conveniences would be as cruel as abandoning a domesticated pet by the 
roadside. Even if the animal survived, it would be miserable. And we 
would probably be miserable too, if the accouterments of civilization 
were abruptly withdrawn from us. Yet the wild cousins of our 
hypothetical companion animal--whether a parrot, a canine, or a 
feline--live quite happily away from houses and packaged pet food and 
resist our efforts to capture and domesticate them, just as primitive 
peoples live quite happily without civilization and often resist its 
imposition. Clearly, animals (including people) can adapt either to wild 
or domesticated ways of life over the course of several generations, 
while adult individuals tend to be much less adaptable. In the view of 
many of its proponents, primitivism implies a direction of social change 
over time, as opposed to an instantaneous, all-or-nothing choice. We in 
the industrial world have gradually accustomed ourselves to a way of 
life that appears to be leading toward a universal biological holocaust. 
The question is, shall we choose to gradually accustom ourselves to 
another way of life--one that more successfully integrates human 
purposes with ecological imperatives--or shall we cling to our present 
choices to the bitter end?

Obviously, we cannot turn back the clock. But we are at a point in 
history where we not only can, but must pick and choose among all the 
present and past elements of human culture to find those that are most 
humane and sustainable. While the new culture we will create by doing so 
will not likely represent simply an immediate return to wild food 
gathering, it could restore much of the freedom, naturalness, and 
spontaneity that we have traded for civilization's artifices, and it 
could include new versions of cultural forms with roots in humanity's 
remotest past. We need not slavishly imitate the past; we might, rather, 
be inspired by the best examples of human adaptation, past and present. 
Instead of "going back," we should think of this process as "getting 
back on track."
Haven't we gained important knowledge and abilities through 
civilization? Wouldn't renouncing these advances be stupid and 
short-sighted?
If human beings are inherently mostly good, sociable, and creative, it 
is inevitable that much of what we have done in the course of the 
development of civilization should be worth keeping, even if the 
enterprise as a whole was skewed. But how do we decide what to keep? 
Obviously, we must agree upon criteria. I would suggest that our first 
criterion must be ecological sustainability. What activities can be 
pursued across many generations with minimal environmental damage? A 
second criterion might be, What sorts of activities promote--rather than 
degrade--human dignity and freedom?
If human beings are inherently good, then why did we make the "mistake" 
of creating civilization? Aren't the two propositions (human beings are 
good, civilization is bad) contradictory?

Only if taken as absolutes. Human nature is malleable, its qualities 
changing somewhat according to the natural and social environment. 
Moreover, humankind is not a closed system. We exist within a natural 
world that is, on the whole, "good," but that is subject to rare 
catastrophes. Perhaps the initial phases of civilization were humanity's 
traumatized response to overwhelming global cataclysms accompanying and 
following the end of the Pleistocene. Kingship and warfare may have 
originated as survival strategies. Then, perhaps civilization itself 
became a mechanism for re-traumatizing each new generation, thus 
preserving and regenerating its own psycho-social basis.
What practical suggestions for the future stem from primitivism? We 
cannot all revert to gathering and hunting today because there are just 
too many of us. Can primitivism offer a practical design for living?
No philosophy or "-ism" is a magical formula for the solution of all 
human problems. Primitivism doesn't offer easy answers, but it does 
suggest an alternative direction or set of values. For many centuries, 
civilization has been traveling in the direction of artificiality, 
control, and domination. Primitivism tells us that there is an inherent 
limit to our continued movement in that direction, and that at some 
point we must begin to choose to readapt ourselves to nature. The point 
of a primitivist critique of civilization is not necessarily to insist 
on an absolute rejection of every aspect of modern life, but to assist 
in clarifying issues so that we can better understand the tradeoffs we 
are making now, deepen the process of renegotiating our personal 
bargains with nature, and thereby contribute to the reframing of our 
society's collective covenants.

V. Some Concluding Thoughts

In any discussion of primitivism we must keep in mind civilization's 
"good" face--the one characterized (in Lewis Mumford's words) by

     the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of 
visual and musical arts, the effort to widen the circle of communication 
and economic intercourse far beyond the range of any local community: 
ultimately the purpose to make available to all [people] the discoveries 
and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values 
and purposes that any single group has discovered.

Civilization brings not only comforts, but also the opportunity to think 
the thoughts of Plato or Thoreau, to travel to distant places, and to 
live under the protection of a legal system that guarantees certain 
rights. How could we deny the worth of these things?

Naturally, we would like to have it all; we would like to preserve 
civilization's perceived benefits while restraining its destructiveness. 
But we haven't found a way to do that yet. And it is unlikely that we 
will while we are in denial about what we have left behind, and about 
the likely consequences of what we are doing now.

While I advocate taking a critical look at civilization, I am not 
suggesting that we are now in position to render a final judgment on it. 
It is entirely possible that we are standing on the threshold of a 
cultural transformation toward a way of life characterized by relatively 
higher degrees of contentment, creativity, justice, and sustainability 
than have been known in any human society heretofore. If we are able to 
follow this transformation through, and if we call the result 
"civilization," then we will surely be entitled to declare civilization 
a resounding success.

(c) 1995 by Richard Heinberg

The Author's website is at: http://www.museletter.com/

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