We can never recover an old vision, once it has been supplanted. But what we can do is to discover a new vision in harmony with the memories of old, far-off, far, far-off experience that lie within us.
— D.H. LawrenceAll things are full of gods.
— ThalesOne existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow
And man’s dark soul.
— Robinson Jeffers
While certainly acknowledging its impact on the natural world, anarcho-primitivism tends to emphasise the ways in which civilisation is harmful to humanity: alienation, poverty, depression, mass shootings. Hunter-gatherer society is held up as a ideal of perfect human happiness and equality while all forms of social injustice are linked to civilisation. Civilisation, in other words, is essentially presented as a social problem. It is conceptualised as a particular form of social organisation that has produced a number of undesirable circumstances. In this regard, anarcho-primitivism is no different from socialism or any of the other post enlightenment social philosophies that present a vision of society without suffering. Its critique of civilisation is based on what is best for humanity.
This is a problem because at the root of the civilised consciousness is the idea that human beings are the most important thing in the universe. Thus, if anarcho-primitvists continue to focus their critique of civilisation on its harmful effects on humanity and continue to champion hunter gatherer society as an egalitarian paradise, they will ultimately be perpetuating the belief that what occurs among humanity is more important than anything else.
Is it true that in the absence of civilisation many humans would be healthier and happier than they are now? Probably, yes. The problem with this perspective is not that it values humanity but that it values humanity above all else. To remove the anarchist or political or social justice element from the critique of civilisation is not to say that the suffering of humans is unimportant. It simply puts that suffering into a larger, broader context. The suffering of a human is no more or less important than the suffering of a fly. Needless to say, as human beings, we will naturally experience the suffering of our family and friends more intensely than the suffering of a fly. This ultimately does not make it any more significant, however.
If we accept that the life of a fly or a speck of moss is as important as a human life, as I suspect most anarcho-primitivists do, we must also accept that we have left the realm of politics behind. In this context, the concerns of human society, the specific struggles of this particular group or that, are irrelevant. I love the earth more than I love humanity. At the core of this position is a fundamentally religious attitude that I believe primitivists should embrace.
Animism is the belief that all natural things — not made by humans — have souls: trees, ferns, grasses, rivers, mountains, pebbles as well as all creatures. Everything in the world is sacred and nothing more or less so than anything else. This understanding of sacredness is not dependent on any particular idea of god, it is simply the acknowledgement of the divinity in all things. And this divinity does not need to be substantiated or proven. As the ancient daoists understood, any attempt to say ‘what it is’ must be doomed to failure. The dao that can be named is not the dao. We, as creatures of civilisation, have been conditioned to accept nothing without precise definitions and convincing logic. This desire is the desire of the scientist, the engineer, the technician. Likewise, the soul that can be named is not the soul. Any definition of this soul or divinity that exists within all things must necessarily be hopelessly limited by human consciousness and language. Though perhaps we can say, like the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Jews, Chinese, and others, that the concept of the soul or spirit is related to the breath. And, if we quiet the mind and listen carefully, we can perceive the breath of the rocks, the streams, the desert sands.
Historically, animism has been tied to particular places, specific mountains, specific rivers. There are as many different animisms as there are tribes and peoples. As such, any particular animism cannot be universal. The animism of one particular tribe of central American peoples cannot be the same as a particular community of Scandinavians or Mongols. In this regard, however, we can think of the zen koan: the finger can point to the moon’s location but the finger is not the moon. The finger matters little; the moon is really the thing. In other words, the particular animistic spirits of a particular community are merely the finger. We must look to the moon: the universal sacredness of the earth.
Until now, anarcho-primitivism has insisted on engaging in the realm of intellectual arguments. For all that critics of civilisation reject the social and cultural structures that dominate our lives, there is a strong tendency to tacitly accept certain civilised modes of thought, namely secularism and empiricism. In much anarcho-primitivist literature by seminal writers such as John Zerzan and Kevin Tucker, there is a clear commitment to demonstrating truth through the presentation of valid empirical evidence and persuasive logic. Appeals to reason are made. Arguments are constructed and deployed. Facts gathered by experts are cited ad nauseum. These are the master’s tools, civilised tools, and history is the graveyard of the ideologies that thought themselves immune to the influence of the tools and tactics they used.
Anarcho-primitivists seek to ‘make their case’ to those who do not reject civilisation. People that embrace civilisation do so not because they don’t have ‘the facts’. One could present thousands of facts ‘proving’ the relative happiness and ease of hunter gatherer life and not a single person would be willing to abandon their current way of life or even concede that the critique of civilisation has merit.
Ultimately it does not matter what hunter gatherers did or did not do. It doesn’t matter which historical societies were authoritarian or cultivated crops. The critique of civilisation should not be based on arguments. The critique of civilisation should be made based on the belief in the spirits of the earth. Civilisation is not bad because it causes groups of humans to quibble amongst each other and suffer. Suffering is an inescapable part of life and need not be lamented. Civilisation is bad because it is a war against the gods.
In their fervour to convince others anarcho-primitivists become increasingly dogmatic. They rage against ‘leftists’, they argue about veganism, they debate the relative merits of immediate-return economies versus delayed-return economies, they become hopelessly bogged down in endless bickering concerning the morality of violence, they delight and despair alternately in the face of new abhorrent technologies. As such, the critique of civilisation is utterly solipsistic. And it is not merely that anarcho-primitivists tend to theorise endlessly without any attempt to apply praxis. The few actions that one does see, as we have said above, are meaningless and only symbolic in the broadest and most vague terms.
It is time to leave all of this behind. It does not matter what the philosophers say. It does not matter what the scientists say. We must accept that our beliefs are religious in nature and depend on faith.
It is time to reassert the nature-based spirituality of our collective human past. If the natural world is not sacred, then why should it matter? The only alternative is to say that the natural world is important because we depend on it for our own survival as a species. This is to say, as we have seen above, that humanity is really the thing we care about and nothing more: that the natural world is important to us only insofar as it serves our needs. Any argument for the inherent value of all natural things can only be made from spiritual grounds.
It is time to give up writing pseudo-scholarly books, essays, and articles, fighting cops, organising protests, destroying ATMS, and setting things on fire. These are the tactics of those who wish to improve human society for particular groups of humans. These are not actions that reflect the belief that natural life is sacred.
Humanity will not change its fate through action. Not through the actions of governments and companies, not through the actions of mass movements, and certainly not through the actions of a handful of disgruntled anarchists. Humanity’s fate is sealed. The world it has known for 10,000 years will not last. It is foolish and vain to try to predict the nature of its collapse or to picture the world that will follow. Will it be good? Will it be bad? It does not matter. It will occur and humanity will be forced to respond to it. Perhaps human society has a future in some other form. Perhaps humanity will be extinguished entirely.
The path has always been clear to those who choose to see. We must shun civilisation and the things of civilisation. In our hearts if not in the wild world itself, we must go into the forest and never come out. We must reunite our souls with the souls of the trees, the rocks, the streams, the dirt. We must meditate on our place in the cosmos. In doing so, we will not change the fate of this world but we will be, at last, true to our nature once again. The world of the Paleolithic hunter gatherers is gone for good. We cannot return to the past. But the gods that we once knew are still waiting for us in the wild places of the world. If we go to them, they will embrace us.
I would add that there are those today who believe quite religiously that humanity’s place in the cosmos, our “nature,” is to be separate from Nature and to become a self-created, totally artificial, new form of “life.” I see no way to reconcile these two extreme visions unless each agrees that we need portions of both. I strive for that inclusiveness, which means rejecting some of each while merging the best of both, avoiding the extremes.
Having said that, I am, nevertheless, seeking a way back to nature that includes the least destructive parts of civilization and technology. I know some who are living that way. When I am able to reunite with “the souls of the trees, the rocks, the streams, the dirt,” I feel whole. I no longer think of this in terms of spirituality. For me, it’s a matter of health and well-being, as well as a fuller realization of expanded consciousness shared among all life, a phenomenon science has already well-documented. Real stuff, not illusion.
It’s a shame to see this essay’s continued circulation as it misses on nearly all the primary aspects of what anarcho-primitivism is actually about. If you hadn’t read any or much of AP writing, it’d be easy to accept Ramon’s straw men, but that’s about it.
Right off the bat, Ramon equates AP with being a political movement since we support “anarchist tactics.’ In fact, we’ve been at the forefront of attacking revolutionary zeal for some time as it relates solely on the political spectrum. And if you want to fight on political terms, it means fighting nation-states. In nearly all contexts, that’s a losing fight.
AP, on the other hand, is about understanding the nature of civilization, as it originates with domestication, in an ecological sense: how does it function as a parasitic mockery of an organism. We aren’t looking for the right platform to contest it’s legitimacy, we seek to undermine and eliminate its means of propagation.
AP is anti-political in nature.
Attacks on civilization can easily be anti-political in nature as well.
Since I’m being falsely accused of perpetuating these myths, I’ll interject some of my own writing that Ramon seems to have overlooked, incidentally or intentionally, in formulating his hypotheses here.
Failure of Revolution: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-tucker-the-failure-of-revolution
What Ramon wants to take task with, ultimately falling flat, is our insistence that civilization can and should be critiqued on objective terms. The notion that we are stuck with “the master’s tools” is ludicrous. And Ramon notes this. There’s not much consistency between his writings, but he’s no stranger to the heresy of historical grounding.
The world we critique is the world we live in. If we want to cast off the tools of “The Master” in the form of not relying on demonstrable, historical, and contemporary examples of how civilization is destroying the world, then, yes, what are we worth? Does that mean we are reduced to the “Master’s” imagination or view of the world? Absolutely not. It’s an asinine assumption that animistic world views and experiences are contradicting to articulated critiques that aren’t merely based in philosophy.
And make no mistake, that’s exactly what this is: philosophical meanderings based on what appears to be social media arguments reduced to dogmatic nibbles and presumptions.
Civilization is real. Like it or not, this is the reality that we face. It is the connections with wildness that we make, personally and communally, that compel us to target the processes and technology of domestication, to rewild and actively resist, not abstracted moralistic principles.
The proposition that Ramon has stated here (contrary to his ridicule worthy bromance with “eco-extremists”) and that other people within Dark Mountain have stated has nothing to do with engaging wildness and resisting civilization. Much of it seems tainted with the resolve that resistance is always futile and that if we can obscure the language of critique enough, perhaps Nature never existed to fight for anyways. It’s true that it may be futile, but make no mistake, the resolve of the absolved isn’t animism, it’s philosophy.
The animists of this world fought civilization with everything they had, including themselves. They fought and continue to fight it. The only thing more futile than resistance was the pale shell of a life they faced after decimation and submission.
Does it matter what hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists thought and did? Absolutely I would say, especially because they aren’t dead yet. They face the same beast we feed when we turn on our laptops to post self-indulgent theses on why philosophical penance trumps potentially futile acts of defiance. For some reason, that point sadly needs reiterated here.
Our goal isn’t to create a platform for building the new world brought about by revolutionary political overthrow. Our goal is to expand and deepen the critique of civilization and domestication, so that we can understand the depths of material, social, ecological and political domination that weigh on us; so that we can target, undermine, and potentially bleed the apparatus that is weighing us down.
I know that’s not the goal of the otherwise potentially sympathetic readers of this site. I typically wouldn’t consider those individuals who want to run problematic. But if you want to try and stand in our way, then I will absolutely stand up to the false safety you provide yourselves.
And if you want to get a better understanding of a what an animistic view of the world that accepts the history of civilization as reality looks like, let me propose my own: ‘To Speak of Wildness.’ http://www.blackandgreenreview.org/2015/10/bagr2-to-speak-of-wildness-kevin-tucker.html
For wildness and anarchy,
KT
“It is time to give up writing pseudo-scholarly books, essays, and articles, fighting cops, organising protests, destroying ATMS, and setting things on fire.”
As far as the pseudo-scholarly books, essays and articles go, a jaundiced eye could see much Dark Mountain writing as pseudo-scholarly, including this very essay. A more charitable interpretation would be that we are trying to fumble our way towards some kind of understanding of how to live with/in our current predicament, and that this work is too important to be left to the professionals, if such there be.
But as for direct action, it’s kind of ironic at the very time when we have some of the biggest mass mobilizations ever seen of native and non-native people to directly resist the destruction caused by the Machine, all over the world, but certainly in North America and Europe — many protests are being organised, and not just by “a handful of disgruntled anarchists” — to be arguing that no, there’s no point in fighting the system (“anarchism”) and the only work we can usefully do is in our hearts (“primitivism”).
I think this is to fall into the same trap of dualistic thinking as characterises civilization itself. No, you can’t change things through action alone; but nor can you eschew action and just change your heart. They are both necessary and complementary. In fact, they are the same thing, seen from two different points of view. Or so I feel and believe.
This morning I awoke before dawn in my outdoor bed, hearing the last great horned owls hunting our bit of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, My wife and I had coffee on our little porch chatting with hummingbirds and doves and rabbits, watching the light turn green leaves golden for just a second.
Then Kait went to work in her gardens planting flowers while I watered and fed our tortoises, and then ourselves. Kait went back to her gardens while I researched a local politician who is complicit in trying to inflict a massive new highway through our peaceful valley.
I found enough interesting contradictions to write a small news article for a local blog. We have gathered a coalition from all parts of the spectrum to oppose Interstate 11, with a powerful array of politicians and developers and bureaucrats against us. But we keep on keeping on, because we are fighting for our homeland. Our reasons are varied, our politics widely divergent, but we have found we can work together, and that working together, we can be effective.
After lunch we took a nap with our dog, then looked at the day’s rather miserable news. Kait took advantage of the evening’s coolness to finish off some outside projects while I cooked and read the post and decided to respond.
It was a day of prayer, of connection, though none was spoken, and of action. It was what each and every day should be until we can’t do it any more.
“We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
–Joseph Campbell.
“I decline to freterize.” — Opus the Penguin.
Thanks, Albert, for keeping it real and giving a beautiful concrete example of what I meant!
There is a delicious irony in passionately decrying the evils of civilization via a computer and the internet. Not that civilization can’t be improved by a good dose of critical assessment.
But as CGJ (I think) commented once and wisely: ‘The fundamental questions of life are insoluble – that’s why they’re fundamental.