In “Beyond Civilised & Primitive,” Ran Prieur explores a dichotomy that has long been part of the debates raised by the environmentalist movement since its inception; a set of standardised images relative to our concepts of mankind and society, which tends to give rise to many a pipe dream on either side.
According to “primitivism,” in order to escape from the many ills of modern-day society, mankind should return to the Golden Age of pre-civilisation — as exemplified by the so-called “primitive” nations we know today, or following our fantasies concerning the lives of prehistorical humans:
“As a guiding ideology, as a utopian vision, primitivism can destroy Marxism or libertarianism because it digs deeper and overthrows their foundations. It defeats the old religions on evidence. And best of all, it presents a utopia that is not in the realm of imagination or metaphysics, but has actually happened. We can look at archaeology and anthropology and history and say: ‘Here’s a forager-hunter society where people were strong and long-lived. Here’s a tribe where the ‘work’ is so enjoyable that they don’t even have the concept of ‘freeloading’. Here are European explorers writing that certain tribes showed no trace of violence or meanness.’”
Of course, such a vision is one that chooses to ignore the many unsavoury aspects that also marked the life of these tribes — be it murderous warfare, ritual abuse, malnutrition, or the extermination of thousands of animal species due to overhunting (on behalf of the first human settlers to reach every single continent), for example.
As Prieur points out, this debate on “what we should be/how we should live” is of course, first and foremost, about who/what we are. A recurrent argument of primitivists is that civilisation — and especially, industrial civilisation — arrived relatively late in our history: “We lived as peaceful tribes without trains or Facebook for 90% of our history,” etc. Naturally, the issue is that as a species, humanity has been in a state of constant evolution:
“There is no place you can stick a pin and say ‘this is our nature’, because our nature is not a location – it is a journey. … Primitivists want to say that all the steps up to the last few are who we are, and the last few are not who we are.”
Primitivists also tend to argue that the birth of civilisation was nothing but a “fluke,” due to someone’s sudden discovery of the way to grow crops.
“If civilisation began with a fluke, we would expect to see it begin only once, and spread from there. But instead we see grain farming and explosions of human social complexity in several places at about the same time.”
… and there is at least one undeniable example of a civilisation that grew and prospered in complete autarchy for about 1200 years (3000-1800 B.C.) — Norte Chico, in present-day Peru. It was not an agrarian society, but used cotton as a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy to take form. So perhaps civilisation was bound to happen, after all?
“It seems to be about economics, or more precisely, about human cognition. After thousands of generations of slow change, human nature reached a tipping point that permitted large complex societies to appear in radically different circumstances.”
The myth of the “wise savage” living “in harmony with Nature” also sprung from the encounter by Europeans of the Native Americans — small and nomadic populations. But there is a wealth of evidence showing that before they were decimated by European germs, these peoples actually lived in densely populated, agrarian societies, sometimes concentrated in large urban centres. In a word… “The ‘Indians’ of American myth were post-crash societies!”
As a result, Prieur recommends we ditch the whole dichotomy altogether, and focus instead on new ways of learning from the positive sides of these societies, instead of attempting to go back to that state:
“Suppose we say, ‘We can regrow the spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700s, not as a temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolising society and the rise of another, but as a permanent condition – and we will protect this condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing new ways. We can do this because human nature continues to evolve. Just as the old model of civilisation became available to us as we changed, we are changing again and new doors are opening.’”
But a critique of civilisation would be ineffective without a critique of technology. How do we draw the line between “good” and “bad” technology?
“I think the root of civilisation, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy. It’s like the famous Twilight Zone episode where there’s a box with a button, and if you push it you get a million dollars and someone you don’t know dies.
…
The kicker is, once we gain from extending our power beyond our seeing and feeling, we have an incentive to repress our seeing and feeling. If child slaves are making your clothing, and you want to keep getting clothing, you either have to not know about them, or know about them and feel good about it. You have to make yourself ignorant or evil.”
Although the author doesn’t mention Ivan Illich, this notion that technology (or any other man-made artifact) is all the more destructive and inhuman the further away it is produced from the end user, resembles once again Illich’s concept of “convivial technology” (which I mentioned previously).
Prieur seems strangely optimistic as regards the evolution of consumer behaviour and its impact in the greater scheme of things:
“But gradually we’re learning. Every time it comes out that some product is made with sweatshop labour, a few people stop buying it. Every day, someone is in a supermarket deciding whether to spend extra money to buy shadegrown coffee or fair trade chocolate. It’s not making a big difference, but all mass changes have to start with a few people, and my point is that we are stretching the human conscience further than it’s ever gone, making sacrifices to help forests we will never see and people we will never meet. This is not simple-minded or ‘idealistic’, but rational, highly sophisticated moral behaviour. And you find it not at the trailing edge of civilisation but at the leading edge, among educated urbanites.
There are also growing movements to reduce energy consumption, to eat locally-produced food, to give up high-paying jobs for better quality of life, and to trade industrial-scale for human-scale tools.”
Six years after this essay was published, there still are too few, way too few “cultural creatives” sharing these ideas and putting them into practice to have any meaningful impact on the whole neoliberal civilisation: the rate at which species are going extinct keeps accelerating, and rainforests are still being cut down alarmingly fast.
While it is laudable to at least try to limit one’s impact by consuming more fair-trade products, or by growing one’s own vegetables, I’m less and less convinced such “voluntary simplicity” alone is about to make any sensible difference, anytime soon.
But Prieur probably disagrees, and is concerned that saboteurs (encouraged by Derrick Jensen’s books perhaps?) might try to bring down civilisation brutally:
“What I fear is that some writers are trying to inspire a movement to actively cause a hard collapse, and if they attract enough followers, they could succeed. This would be a terrible mistake – not just a moral mistake but a strategic mistake – and the root of it is old-fashioned authoritarian thinking: that if you force someone to do something, it’s the same as if they do it on their own. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. The more we are forced to abandon this system, the less we will learn, and the more aggressively we will fight to rebuild something like it. And the more we choose to abandon it, the more we will learn, and the less likely we will make the same mistakes.”
It is completely true that no imposed change can be accepted light-heartedly, especially not by whoever benefitted from the way things were originally. But after all, the people who might be “forced to abandon” the current system are but a minority worldwide; and one could imagine that a “hard crash” would be the sort of situation that would make it impossible to rebuild society under the form in which we know it nowadays.
Regardless of whether we face a hard crash or a soft landing, how are we to imagine a new society combining stability, freedom and ecological responsibility?
“The best plan I can think of is to build our system out of cells of less than 150 people, roughly the number at which cooperation tends to give way to hierarchy, and even then to expect cells to go bad, and have built-in pathways for dead cells to be broken down and new ones to form and individuals to move from cell to cell. Basically, we’d be making a big system that’s like a living body, where all past big systems have been animated corpses.”
Again, this seems to correspond very much to what is currently happening in West Kurdistan… Could democratic confederalism be a way to break the rise-and-fall cycle of civilisation? Or do we need deeper, evolutionary-level mutations in our way of thinking to finally be able to reach such a stage?