An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought And Practice

April 11, 2007 12:06 PM

An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought And Practice What Is Primitivism? . . . Biocentrism vs. Anthropocentrism . . . A Critique of Symbolic Culture . . . The Domestication of Life . . . The Rejection of Science . . . Against Mass Society . . . Beyond Leftism . . . Rewilding and Reconnection
posted by jason's_planet (221 comments total)

Whatever, kids. Just keep it out of my neighborhood, thanks.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 12:22 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivism recognizes that for most of human history, we lived in face-to-face communities in balance with each other and our surroundings, without formal hierarchies and institutions to mediate and control our lives.

But formal hierarchies are seen in almost all civilizations that we know, either with a chief or wise man or priest. And many primate species show a dominance hierarchy.
posted by demiurge at 12:23 PM on April 11, 2007

Well, fantasies of the noble primitive aside, I've worked in non-hierarchic structures that were quite effective.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:26 PM on April 11, 2007

Yeah, it's hard to read that primitivism paragraph without cringing.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:26 PM on April 11, 2007

This is from the Green Anarchy Collective. They often seem to position themselves as the "orthodoxy" of anti-civilization anarchy, but there's plenty going on beyond this, particularly in opposition to their points about the role of science and symbolism. Derrick Jensen's pretty close to them, but Daniel Quinn is not. Online, there's Ran Prieur, Jeff Vail and, I hope I'm not being too immodest here, my own tribe.

But formal hierarchies are seen in almost all civilizations that we know, either with a chief or wise man or priest. And many primate species show a dominance hierarchy.

They're anti-civilization. Civilization is defined by the institutionalized exploitation of formal hierarchies. But civilizations are in the minority of human societies. For most of our existence as a species, there's no evidence of human hierarchy, until the Agricultural Revolution. Sure, there are lots of naturally hierarchical animals, but Homo sapiens isn't one of them.
posted by jefgodesky at 12:27 PM on April 11, 2007

And while you're at it, GET OFF MY LAWN !!!
posted by ZachsMind at 12:29 PM on April 11, 2007

These people, some of them quite thoughtful, seem to think that it's just a matter of having enough resolve, or willpower, and we can all revert to pre-agricultural bliss. Which, uh, no. That toothpaste is not going to go back into the tube barring some kind of Riddley Walker-type cataclysm.
posted by everichon at 12:30 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

I, for one, look forward to the inaugural episode of the Eusa Show.
posted by Midnight Creeper at 12:32 PM on April 11, 2007

And the young earnest anarchists do need to get off the lawn of the food coop where I work. Jeez. Go to the goddam park.
posted by everichon at 12:32 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

Swossage!
posted by everichon at 12:33 PM on April 11, 2007

everichon -- that is true, and most primitivists address that practical concern with the retort that understanding what has worked in the past can not only illuminate our current problems, but can also help us create solutions that absorb some of the patterns that have worked in the past, even if a wholesale abandonment of civilization remains untenable.

I and some others have made the argument that civilization is not just bad for people, but it is also self-destructive, and ultimately leads to its own collapse. In this case, it was a doomed enterprise from the start, and primitivism offers the best chance humans have of surviving such a catastrophic overshoot.

Others have tried to dismiss primitivists as genocidal sociopaths by suggesting that they intend to engineer a total holocaust wiping out the vast majority of humans on earth, and proceed to judge primitivists as if they were already proceeding on such a plan. I've never met any actual primitivist who holds such a view, though.
posted by jefgodesky at 12:36 PM on April 11, 2007

Funny, Zachsmind, originally I was going to say "you kids go foment whatever revolution you'd like, just as long as you keep it off my lawn."
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 12:37 PM on April 11, 2007

'Primitivists' who are 'against civilization' on the internet. That's cute. Enjoy your grazing and foraging for grubs whilst I crank up some digital music and grab a pasteurized beer out of my fridge.
posted by jonmc at 12:37 PM on April 11, 2007 [6 favorites]

The Rejection of Science . . .

That bit alone is enough to burn my biscuits. Seriously, I had one of these types try to tell me (via a Yahoo! Groups post) that (I quote):

"Tsunami aid is like a denial of the truth - trying to keep the technocratic/earth-playground dream alive."

Erm...EFF OFF.
posted by retronic at 12:38 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

Others have tried to dismiss primitivists as genocidal sociopaths

no. delusional dimwits.
posted by jonmc at 12:39 PM on April 11, 2007

'Primitivists' who are 'against civilization' on the internet. That's cute.

How so? We think such things cause more harm than good, but they're here. You don't kick a crutch out from under somebody with a broken foot, do you? Does that mean you think it's great to be crippled?

That bit alone is enough to burn my biscuits.

As I mentioned, not all primitivists are also anti-science. I fail to see why my fellow primitivists cannot recognize the long-standing scientific tradition in primitive societies, going all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic.
posted by jefgodesky at 12:42 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Glad my uncle finally gets a shout-out.
posted by parmanparman at 12:44 PM on April 11, 2007

For most of our existence as a species, there's no evidence of human hierarchy, until the Agricultural Revolution.

For most of our existence as a species, there's very little evidence period. Too little to make firm assertions either way about prehistoric social hierarchies, though knowledgeable anthropologists are welcome to correct me.

Anyway, I too, love that all these guys have blogs.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:47 PM on April 11, 2007

How so? We think such things cause more harm than good, but they're here.

If you believe in 'primitivism,' put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, it's all mental masturbation, sir.
posted by jonmc at 12:47 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

I have no patience for this kind of thing. These people would be the first to be killed and eaten in a pimitive society.
posted by mert at 12:50 PM on April 11, 2007 [4 favorites]

For most of our existence as a species, there's no evidence of human hierarchy, until the Agricultural Revolution. Sure, there are lots of naturally hierarchical animals, but Homo sapiens isn't one of them.

I don't buy that. In still-extant human hunter-gatherer cultures there do tend to be leaders and followers, even when we're talking about very small social groups. Those with the best combination of competence, experience, and assertiveness tend to be leaders. (And this can be situational; maybe Grandma leads the social order where it comes to etiquette/customs/spirituality but Dad leads the hunt, etc.)

Also it's pretty clear that modern society has, and still is, stomped all over primitive cultures in terms of evolutionary success... for good or ill.

Now time for me to rtfa I guess.
posted by Foosnark at 12:50 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

retronic, you pretty much captured what makes me cringe in this movement.

A return to some sort of pre-hierarchical bliss (supposing for the moment that such a thing ever existed) would require most of the world's population to die. Which might sound really fun and cute to people who spend all day reading sentences on the internet like Primitivism is simply an anthropological, intellectual, and experiential examination of the origins of civilization and the circumstances that led to this nightmare we currently inhabit., but to most people sounds maniacal.

Rejecting technology because it can save lives is just gross.

But having said that, Anarchists are among the few people admitting that the current political milieu is just a symptom of much deeper troubles, so I do like them for that.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:53 PM on April 11, 2007

Anarchists are among the few people admitting that the current political milieu is just a symptom of much deeper troubles, so I do like them for that.

Maybe. But a society without laws or government ultimately leads to rule by the most ruthless. It'd be like living in Al Swearingen's Deadwood. Of course, most governments arent that far off from that either, but under democracy there's at least some hope of redress.
posted by jonmc at 12:57 PM on April 11, 2007

There's something intrinsically Fred Phelpsian -- or, I guess, cultish in general -- about primitivists. Namely: "Here is what we think. It stands in opposition to what almost everyone else on the planet thinks. Everyone else in the planet is deluded and wrong, and we are the only ones with moral authority."

That said, I think a lot of "Primitivism Lite" stuff like a rejection of the modern food supply trends has a lot going for it.
posted by gurple at 12:59 PM on April 11, 2007

I don't buy it.
The march of civilization is fraught with problems and bloodshed, but it's inevitable and essential. It moves toward greater populations, which is a natural move for a species. We are capable of complicated social hierarchies that improve our lot as animals. It's a way of putting all our eggs in one nearly indestructible basket instead of carrying them around in our pockets. Our current system is not optimized - corruption and poverty still reign over most of the world, but that doesn't mean civilization is a failure - it just means it's struggling.

As for evidence of human hierarchy before the Agricultural revolution, as octobersuprise said there is little evidence at all, but what evidence do we have? Huge graves for shamans, for one thing, which throws that idea right out the window. There were hierarchies among the hunters and gatherers almost certainly - based on age, ability, and experience, the same things which our current systems should (but isn't really) be based on.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:01 PM on April 11, 2007

Oh yeah, jonmc, I'm totally with you there.

I don't think they know exactly what those "deeper troubles" are, and they definitely don't have a clue about the solutions, but they're going beyond "anything but Bush/Blair/etc." thinking, which is good.
posted by roll truck roll at 1:02 PM on April 11, 2007

or i could hit preview and not just repeat what foosnark said
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:03 PM on April 11, 2007

the long-standing scientific tradition in primitive societies, going all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic.

Really? You mean to say that primitive societies were aware of and employed scientific method? Really?
posted by c13 at 1:09 PM on April 11, 2007

Rejecting technology because it can save lives is just gross.

Well said, roll truck roll.
posted by retronic at 1:10 PM on April 11, 2007

Chellis Glendinning apparently tried to put her money uh lifestyle where her mouth is.

I appreciate the yearning behind this kind of thought, but then I also appreciate the yearning for Narnia in a wardrobe.
posted by everichon at 1:12 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

These kids aren't anarchists any more than "anarchocapitalists" are anarchists. Wanting to get rid of the government does not make you an anarchist.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:13 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

Your ism is lacking.
posted by Burhanistan at 1:14 PM on April 11, 2007

Listen, I know Civ4's a resource hog and not really that much of an improvement over Civ3, but I hardly expected it to turn anyone to anarchism.
posted by COBRA! at 1:14 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

Hobbs said it best: Nasty, brutish, and short.

Yeah, that would be a fun thing to return to.

And do they not realize that even some primates have a hierarchical structure? I mean, how much further back do they want us to go?
posted by quin at 1:18 PM on April 11, 2007

This guy's work with border-crossers in the Sonoran desert is the closest thing I've seen to an intelligent, useful practice of these ideas, and he didn't refer to himself as an anarchist. He wrote a very interesting book.
posted by everichon at 1:20 PM on April 11, 2007

"In your typically egocentric way, you pretend you're the vanguard, freeing the oppressed from the shackles of ignorance. You conduct a sorry crusade to recast the world in your image. You're dumb enough to think you'll make a difference. You feel that if everyone was like you, society would be wonderful. Yet you walk away scratching your head when the truly oppressed don't want anything to do with you. You've never fought for anything but the right to be infantile.

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, political rhetoric is a cubbyhole for dullards. The political is merely the personal in a cheap, quivering act of sublimation. You oppose power, which is like protesting the sun - scream all you want, but it'll still scorch you. As you cry about global warming, global corporations, and global revolution, I stare into the vacant globes of your eyes. The only anarchy going on is the mutinous misfiring of your brain cells. The 'A' stands for "asshole."

You whine about your "sexuality," how your body is a political combat zone. You're a simple rodent with boring bodily functions which you seek to ennoble. With your flagrant vanity and dishonesty in personal interactions, you reveal yourself to be equally as rotten as the leaders you despise. You invariably wind up imitating the oppressor. Unfortunately, you weren't oppressed to begin with.

For not only are you a liar, you're a hypocrite. You're fascinated by violence until you're confronted with it. You romanticize trauma but have never been traumatized. You demand grant money from a government you seek to destroy. You idolize primitive cultures but would slash your wrists if your CD player broke. You condemn religion but consider yourself enlightened. You're as self-righteous as the moralists upon which you spit. You hate hatred, won't tolerate intolerance, and conspire with others against conformity. " - Jim Goad
posted by jonmc at 1:20 PM on April 11, 2007 [16 favorites]

*scrawls a "circle-A" on backpack*
posted by everichon at 1:22 PM on April 11, 2007

how could chaos possibly require this much homework? How can chaos possibly be somthing that there is a right or wrong way to do?
posted by BeerGrin at 1:26 PM on April 11, 2007

I was going to write something defending anarchism, but it's pointless--the level of self-congratulatory backpatting in this thread is disgusting. I see even jefgodesky's given up.

jonmc, I'm sorry, but no matter how many ad hominems you string together, it still doesn't make an argument.
posted by nasreddin at 1:27 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

Ah'd like to put the anarchists and Jim Goad in a cage and make'em fight. Ah would.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:30 PM on April 11, 2007

I'm sorry, but no matter how many ad hominems you string together, it still doesn't make an argument.

That's not an apology, asshole.

:-) I am joking
posted by roll truck roll at 1:31 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

For most of our existence as a species, there's very little evidence period. Too little to make firm assertions either way about prehistoric social hierarchies, though knowledgeable anthropologists are welcome to correct me.

I have a degree in anthropology, though I'm not a professional anthropologist, and this has been a particular interest of mine, obviously. Rather than rehash the same arguments, I'll point you to this recent thread, in which Pastabagel made precisely the same error. While one can never argue definitively from negative evidence, the proponderance of it is quite striking. The sudden explosion of evidence for hierarchy after the Agricultural Revolution is so deafening that it stretches incredulity to suggest that we actually did have hierarchy prior, we just hid it meticulously, and then suddenly left it out for ayone to find starting 10,000 years ago.

If you believe in 'primitivism,' put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, it's all mental masturbation, sir.

But part of my belief in primitivism is that while it continues to grow, no one can escape civilization. Anyone who tries gets swallowed up by it--sometimes violently. So, I fail to see the hypocrisy. Isn't my money already as much where my mouth is as it could possibly be? For me to do otherwise would force me to enact your caricature of my beliefs, rather than my actual beliefs, wouldn't it?

I have no patience for this kind of thing. These people would be the first to be killed and eaten in a pimitive society.

Can you document a primitive society where people are killed to be eaten? There are societies with funerary cannibalism, I'll give you that, but the only examples I can think of where people are killed so that they can be eaten are the likes of the Donner Party, or the soccer team caught in the Andes, who were all quite civilized (which is why they could not find alternative food sources, such as the Donner Party, who were camped in a grove of pine trees, and could have lived happily off of their needles in tea, or their nuts). I'm afraid it's statements like this that reinforce my conviction that opposition to primitivism is largely a function of one's ignorance of life in primitive societies.

In still-extant human hunter-gatherer cultures there do tend to be leaders and followers, even when we're talking about very small social groups. Those with the best combination of competence, experience, and assertiveness tend to be leaders. (And this can be situational; maybe Grandma leads the social order where it comes to etiquette/customs/spirituality but Dad leads the hunt, etc.)

OK, now follow that through, as well as the implications of the lack of any coercive recourse. If A wields the most influence in one situation, and B in another, and C in still aother, what happens when we map the total influence each member of the society has? Some are respected for their expertise in one field or another, but when we consider the full human experience, the total influence of each members approaches the same baseline. While in any given situation, one person or another may wield more influence, overall, everyone's influence is roughly equal.

It's also been noted that nearly every primitive society extant today has some very elegant methods for limiting the rise of one person to too much power, such as the Bushman custom of "cursing the meat." In fact, your statement seems to fly in the face of most of the ethnographic evidence I know of. Could you provide some ethnographic examples of your claim?

Also it's pretty clear that modern society has, and still is, stomped all over primitive cultures in terms of evolutionary success... for good or ill.

There's two different types of "evolutionary success" here which are being confused. Short-term success bought at long-term detriment ensures evolutionary disaster, because it wipes out stable varieties in the short term, but then collapses itself shortly thereafter. The best biological model I know of for our civilization is that of overshoot, as argued by William Catton in his book of that name (Overshoot). Would you call the profligation of the reindeer on St. Matthews' Island an evolutionary success?

But a society without laws or government ultimately leads to rule by the most ruthless.

How do you square this with the established, ethnographic fact that "ruthlessness" occurs almost solely in societies with both laws and governments? If this were true, then how did humanity survive the million years of evolution it took before we could develop laws and governments? Why, do you suppose, is humanity the only species on the planet that has this problem?

There's something intrinsically Fred Phelpsian -- or, I guess, cultish in general -- about primitivists. Namely: "Here is what we think. It stands in opposition to what almost everyone else on the planet thinks. Everyone else in the planet is deluded and wrong, and we are the only ones with moral authority."

So, your position is that if one does not agree, in large part, with the majority of people at any given time, then one must be "cultish," or, one presumes, wrong? How do you reconcile this with the fact that the majority now disagrees significantly with past majorities? Until very recently, most people on the planet thought civilization was a deadly cancer that would wipe us all out (because until very recently, most people on the planet were not civilized).

The march of civilization is fraught with problems and bloodshed, but it's inevitable and essential.

"Inevitable"? That really gets into the bad old days of pre-Boasian, unilineal cultural evolution, doesn't it? How do you explain the genetic inferiority of the Ju/'hoansi, who have been incapable of getting on board with this "inevitable" development, then?

It moves toward greater populations, which is a natural move for a species.

That's a little bit insane. Just think about that for a moment. If greater population was really "a natural move for a species," then all life on earth would've been wiped out from overpopulation long, long ago. The "natural move for a species" is to establish a dynamic equilibrium of one's population. Constant growth can never be sustained, and any system that depends on it dooms itself to failure.

We are capable of complicated social hierarchies that improve our lot as animals.

It actually reduces our quality of life by essentially every metric.

It's a way of putting all our eggs in one nearly indestructible basket instead of carrying them around in our pockets.

That "basket" is actually guaranteed to be destroyed.

Our current system is not optimized - corruption and poverty still reign over most of the world, but that doesn't mean civilization is a failure - it just means it's struggling.

If we're going to use corruption and poverty as our metric, and that seems fair enough to me, can you point me to the corrupt, poor hunter-gatherers of the past for whom the civilized project was such an improvement? If you try to solve a problem that did not exist before your solution, and your solution simply causes a little bit of it, then you were better off without it.

Huge graves for shamans, for one thing, which throws that idea right out the window.

Where? I'll admit there were a few exceptional cases, such as Sungir. These actually prove my point much more than they detract from it. First, they are remarkable for how rare they are in the Paleolithic, and more importantly, they arise only in geographical flukes that mimic the kind of concentrated food stores that can only be provided systematically by farming. The Kwakiutl show the same pattern. This really just goes further to prove that unless a society has farming, hierarchy is extremely exceptional.

There were hierarchies among the hunters and gatherers almost certainly - based on age, ability, and experience, the same things which our current systems should (but isn't really) be based on.

Since this flies in the face of anthropological consensus, would you mind providing some ethnographic examples to back up such a paradigm-shattering conclusion?

Really? You mean to say that primitive societies were aware of and employed scientific method? Really?

For starters, see Louis Liebenberg's The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science.

Hobbs said it best: Nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes also argued with Francis Bacon over whether evidence should have anything to do with science. Hobbes argued that an argument involving evidence was compromised for it, and that the only legitimate form of argument should be the pure thought experiment. "Nasty, brutish and short" is a fine example, actually; a good enough thought experiment, but at this point, utterly and completely shattered by the anthropological data.

And do they not realize that even some primates have a hierarchical structure? I mean, how much further back do they want us to go?

Some do. Homo sapiens do not. Contrary to the assertions made here without any reference, source or example, even the most basic anthropology textbook will tell you that observed hunter-gatherers are overwhelmingly egalitarian, and the archaeological record indicates that hierarchy among Homo sapiens appears only with the Agricultural Revolution, in the last 0.016% of our time on this planet.

I see even jefgodesky's given up.

Actually, you're all just typing faster than me.
posted by jefgodesky at 1:32 PM on April 11, 2007 [12 favorites]

So what will one of these geniuses do when they have acute appendicitis? Or an abscessed tooth? Or a strep infection? My sister, mother and wife would all be gone if it hadn't been for civilized medical technology. These folks are as moronic as the people waiting for the rapture to come.
posted by octothorpe at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

But part of my belief in primitivism is that while it continues to grow, no one can escape civilization. Anyone who tries gets swallowed up by it--sometimes violently. So, I fail to see the hypocrisy. Isn't my money already as much where my mouth is as it could possibly be? For me to do otherwise would force me to enact your caricature of my beliefs, rather than my actual beliefs, wouldn't it?

Translation: I like to type platitudes, but I won't actually practice what I preach. There's a word for that.
posted by jonmc at 1:37 PM on April 11, 2007

i've enjoyed encounters with folks from green anarchy, the eugene scene, talks by zerzan, books by jensen, the air of a outsider element as it makes its brackish mix with the well-heeled environmental community. the most important contribution it made to my environmental education was not its orthodoxy, but the willingness to explore practices beyond the co-opted program of the 1970s.

ecological thought has exploded nto a complex network of praxes around ghettos, municipalities, suburbs, farms, industries, the wilderness, and everything between. this creative energy, this open-sourcing of the human habitat, is fantastic. primitivists are just one working group of many.

i'm, however, critical of the rhetoric of an edenic past as a motivator. the past has a lot to teach us, but being anti-time, anti-historical change, is not very ecological. resurgence of some lost values, on the other hand, might be very nice.
posted by ioesf at 1:44 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

"Actually, you're all just typing faster than me."

Civilization has its benefits.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 1:44 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

There's something intrinsically Fred Phelpsian -- or, I guess, cultish in general -- about primitivists. Namely: "Here is what we think. It stands in opposition to what almost everyone else on the planet thinks. Everyone else in the planet is deluded and wrong, and we are the only ones with moral authority."

Unpopular != incorrect.
posted by jason's_planet at 1:47 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

So what will one of these geniuses do when they have acute appendicitis? Or an abscessed tooth? Or a strep infection? My sister, mother and wife would all be gone if it hadn't been for civilized medical technology.

There are primitive remedies for all of those which are just as effective as our own. In fact, most of our most effective pharmaceuticals simply turn indigenous herbal remedies into pills. Primitive societies were even performing brain surgery all the way back in the Mesolithic. If your sister, mother and wife died from such simple things in a primitive society, you would have only yourself to blame for not utilizing the many medical resources available to any primitive society. Civilization has no monopoly on medicine, but it does make you sick.

Translation: I like to type platitudes, but I won't actually practice what I preach. There's a word for that.

Could you answer my question? You've really confused me. What I've argued is that civilization cannot be escaped while it's still growing, and it will kill anyone who tries. I've also said that it's self-destroying, and will soon tip into collapse, at which point we should jump ship as quickly as possible, for our own welfare and for the survival of our species. Now, it seems to me that "practicing what I preach" would mean learning primitive skills, herbalism, tracking, hunting, fishing and so forth, so that I'm ready when things start to go bad. But you say "I like to type platitudes, but I won't actually practice what I preach." Could you enlighten me as to how exactly that is? Because what I've been preaching is that we should all be getting ready now as much as we can, rather than fleeing to the woods immediately. Or do you mean that I'm not practicing your caricature of what I preach?
posted by jefgodesky at 1:49 PM on April 11, 2007

(also, jason's_planet is a drinking buddy of mine, so don't take my comments as personal attacks. I just happen to think that this is bullshit is all)
posted by jonmc at 1:50 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivists implicitly assume or maybe even cling to the notion that all men are essentially "good", they imagine basic man to be a noble savage.

These people have never really lived outside the protection of society and with all its rules and laws.

They do not have slightest idea how creative in treachery and deceit people can be either by choice or necessity. They probably also have never worked in larger companies or bureaucracies, otherwise they might have a slight hint of what people can be capable of.

Not that I agree that most of man can be noble most of the time, but it so happens man is an animal like all other animals, an animal that had to compete for limited resources in the harsh reality of nature. All strategies that lead to self-perpetuation are reinforced.

If actually there only were noble savages once "a long time ago", just imagine what a phenomenal evolutionary advantage a lone rogue savage, that tricked, cheated, robbed, plundered, raped, murdered, brutalized and manipulated all others, would have had. Wow. Now imagine how many children such a rogue could father in the course of his evolutionary career. Scale it up. Imagine what an advantage a gang of rouges would have had in a world full of noble savage villages. And then imagine what a really large gang of rogues in a "friendly world of peaceful pink coexistence" could achieve. Imagine how successful in a biological sense these guys would have been. It is BTW no coincidence that all this is not to hard to imagine.

Thus such strains have an evolutionary justification. But on the other hand people that bundle their resources in cooperatives, develop culture and society have a higher chance of managing the "bad strains" and perpetuating themselves. Thus the "good strains" also evolve. These attributes give everyone an advantage, thus people will have a bit of both, some more some less.

Steven Pinker, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, also debunks the misconception of the noble savage. He also held a talk about this at the last TED Conference in Monterey, California.
posted by umop-apisdn at 1:55 PM on April 11, 2007 [4 favorites]

Civilization has no monopoly on medicine

A good solid placebo effect beats out a lot of modern medicine, especially when you factor in the lack of fatal side effects. But, like said above, we can't just go back to beliving in Shamans.

FWIW, the anarchists I've known, East Village squatters and such, have all been real nice people.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:55 PM on April 11, 2007

There are primitive remedies for all of those which are just as effective as our own.

Sure. Which is why life expectancies were so long before the advent of modern medicine.

But you say "I like to type platitudes, but I won't actually practice what I preach." Could you enlighten me as to how exactly that is?

Because you're preaching that technology is bad, science is bad, civilization is bad, yet we're having this conversation on a set of devices that is irrefutably a product of modern science, technology and civilization.

Is society going to crumble? Who the hell knows. If it does I'll go down with the ship. I, like most of humanity, am pretty much helpless against the tide of history and time, no matter how much we like to delude ourselves.
posted by jonmc at 1:55 PM on April 11, 2007

Contrary to the assertions made here without any reference, source or example, even the most basic anthropology textbook will tell you that observed hunter-gatherers are overwhelmingly egalitarian

OK, Jeff. Maybe they don't have kings or CEOs or executive washrooms. But human beings differ in personality, leadership abilities and skills. We don't esteem everyone equally. So how could someone with demonstrated leadership abilities or hunting abilities not rise to the top of a band of hunter-gatherers? And what position would someone who was a lousy hunter, a whiner, a weakling occupy?

Just curious.
posted by jason's_planet at 1:57 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivists implicitly assume or maybe even cling to the notion that all men are essentially "good", they imagine basic man to be a noble savage.

When you tell someone what they're implicitly assuming, make sure it's actually the case. I don't think anyone's said that all primitive people are happy joy-joy folk who all love each other. But I will still repost the Thomas Jefferson quote I ended that last thread with:

We are told that the Powhatans, Mannahoacs, and Monacans, spoke languages so radically different, that interpreters were necessary when they transacted business. Hence we may conjecture, that this was not the case between all the tribes, and probably that each spoke the language of the nation to which it was attached; which we know to have been the case in many particular instances. Very possibly there may have been antiently three different stocks, each of which multiplying in a long course of time, had separated into so many little societies. This practice results from the circumstance of their having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government. Their only controuls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in every man makes a part of his nature. An offence against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns. Imperfect as this species of coercion may seem, crimes are very rare among them: insomuch that were it made a question, whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to the greatest evil, one who has seen both conditions of existence would pronounce it to be the last: and that the sheep are happier of themselves, than under care of the wolves. It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The Savages therefore break them into small ones.

posted by nasreddin at 2:04 PM on April 11, 2007

So what will one of these geniuses do when they have acute appendicitis? Or an abscessed tooth? Or a strep infection?

They'll die. And......? What? Would you rather live a short, free and simple life or a very long miserable one?
Civilization cannot go back in time but, in my very humble opinion, where it's at is not so great.
posted by bobobox at 2:04 PM on April 11, 2007

In fact, most of our most effective pharmaceuticals simply turn indigenous herbal remedies into pills. Primitive societies were even performing brain surgery all the way back in the Mesolithic.

What is the herbal basis for Prozac? Or Lithium?

If you ever needed surgery or other serious procedure, would you prefer to have it done in a Western hospital, or would you prefer to use traditional medicine?
posted by jason's_planet at 2:05 PM on April 11, 2007

There are primitive remedies for all of those which are just as effective as our own.

Hmm. What's the word that I'm looking for here? Oh I remember, "Bullshit". We're getting deep into timecube territory here.
posted by octothorpe at 2:05 PM on April 11, 2007 [4 favorites]

Would you rather live a short, free and simple life or a very long miserable one?

Oh good god, I hate nightmares where I'm back in highschool. Snark aside, do you really think these are the only two options?
posted by everichon at 2:10 PM on April 11, 2007

"This really just goes further to prove that unless a society has farming, hierarchy is extremely exceptional."

Conversely, you could infer that establishing hierarchy is an inherent human tendency, which crops up everywhere in the world, in any situation at any time throughout human history when people aren't spending all of their free time scratching around for sustenance...
posted by stenseng at 2:11 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivism.
posted by Burhanistan at 2:12 PM on April 11, 2007

So, jefgodesky, what do you think of these passages from the article?

Most anarchists and “revolutionaries” spend a significant portion of their time developing schemes and mechanisms for production, distribution, adjudication, and communication between large numbers of people; in other words, the functioning of a complex society. But not all anarchists accept the premise of global (or even regional) social, political, and economic coordination and interdependence, or the organization needed for their administration. We reject mass society for practical and philosophical reasons. First, we reject the inherent representation necessary for the functioning of situations outside of the realm of direct experience (completely decentralized modes of existence). We do not wish to run society, or organize a different society, we want a completely different frame of reference. We want a world where each group is autonomous and decides on its own terms how to live, with all interactions based on affinity, free and open, and non-coercive.

The emphasis on the symbolic is a movement from direct experience into mediated experience in the form of language, art, number, time, etc. Symbolic culture filters our entire perception through formal and informal symbols. It’s beyond just giving things names, but having an entire relationship to the world that comes through the lens of representation. It is debatable as to whether humans are “hard-wired” for symbolic thought or if it developed as a cultural change or adaptation, but the symbolic mode of expression and understanding is certainly limited and its over-dependence leads to objectification, alienation, and a tunnel vision of perception. Many green anarchists promote and practice getting in touch with and rekindling dormant or underutilized methods of interaction and cognition, such as touch, smell, and telepathy, as well as experimenting with and developing unique and personal modes of comprehension and expression.

posted by jason's_planet at 2:15 PM on April 11, 2007

this thread is omitting the context of the neoprimitivists.

1. post-punk kids send wastewater to reed bed, make zine
2. bored architecture students fetishize zine's dramatic rhetoric, get government jobs
3. municipalities build wetlands for water treatment

call them "posturers" but these folks are affecting land-use in a city near you.
posted by ioesf at 2:21 PM on April 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Primitivists implicitly assume or maybe even cling to the notion that all men are essentially "good", they imagine basic man to be a noble savage.

Not true. Primitivists implicitly assume that humans are essentially, well, human. That we are malleable. That we are driven by basic, biological impulses, so what matters is not "human nature" nearly so much as cultural context. In our society, because it operates on such a massive scale providing such effective anonymity, for instance, "greed," the basic, biological impulse to accrue as much wealth as one can, leads to, well, Ken Lay. Put Ken Lay in a hunter-gatherer context, primitivists argue, and watch how things change. First, nomadism makes the direct hoarding of material goods self-defeating. Instead, wealth is counted in human relationships--friends and family that will share with you when you're not doing as well, who will defend you if you get into a fight, and so forth. In this context, Ken Lay is equally greedy, but stealing from those around him won't get him much. Instead, the same greed that led civilized Ken Lay to rip off so many people, leads hunter-gatherer Ken Lay to treat people around him as well as he can, to throw elaborate parties for them, and try to make everyone like him. Same impulses, same "good" or "evil" or whatever you want to call it; all that changes is the cultural context.

They do not have slightest idea how creative in treachery and deceit people can be either by choice or necessity. They probably also have never worked in larger companies or bureaucracies, otherwise they might have a slight hint of what people can be capable of.

Ah ha, now see, when you look for your best examples of how treacherous people can be, what do you turn to? Larger companies or bureaucracies. In larger hierarchies, treachery is rewarded, so people in them become more treacherous.

Now, even if you are not inclined to examine how primitive societies work, look at the lack of this kind of treachery and subterfuge in documented primitive societies, to the point where the myth of the noble savage can be maintained. No one's ever believed in a myth of the truthful politician, have they? The very fact that the myth is so widely believed indicates something.

If actually there only were noble savages once "a long time ago", just imagine what a phenomenal evolutionary advantage a lone rogue savage, that tricked, cheated, robbed, plundered, raped, murdered, brutalized and manipulated all others, would have had.

Yes, let's imagine that. A nomadic hunter-gatherer band has a nefarious, robbing bastard in their midst. Naturally, he is quickly discovered, since there isn't all that much to steal (and even less that wouldn't be freely given, to improve a friendship in which actual wealth in such a society lies), and that person is now booted out. It's very difficult surviving in the wilderness alone, so he's dead by the end of the year.

Sounds like a phenomenal evolutionary advantage to me.

But, like said above, we can't just go back to beliving in Shamans.

No? The more I've objectively researched the subject, despite my heavy pre-disposition to write them off as frauds, the more I've ended up believing in them. David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous is really phenomenal in this sense; it makes magic not only make sense, but makes it absolutely unavoidable. It puts the denial of animism and magic on par with, say, denying the existence of light, or wind.

Sure. Which is why life expectancies were so long before the advent of modern medicine.

Well, they were much longer before agriculture. We've been recovering from the Neolithic Mortality Crisis for 10,000 years. Today, a normal human lifespan is the sole providence of the industrialized elite. The increase in longevity in industrialized countries at the turn of the last century really has much more to do with basic hygiene than modern medicine.

Because you're preaching that technology is bad, science is bad, civilization is bad, yet we're having this conversation on a set of devices that is irrefutably a product of modern science, technology and civilization.

Right--because they happened. They were disastrous, but they happened. To deny them simply because they're bad would just be delusional, akin to suggesting that there is no Rwanda, or denying the Holocaust.

So how could someone with demonstrated leadership abilities or hunting abilities not rise to the top of a band of hunter-gatherers?

How could someone in our society with demonstrated cracklefrazznitz not become our top cracklefrazznitzer? Because "leadership," as we know it, simply does not exist for them. Leadership in primitive societies is limited in both scope and time, like the leader of a given rabbit hunt. Permanent, absolute leadership meant as much to them as cracklefrazznitz means to you--it simply did not exist in their world.

And what position would someone who was a lousy hunter, a whiner, a weakling occupy?

Have you ever met anyone who was terrible at everything? I have not. I've met people who seemed like it, but dig a little deeper, and you find they have some secret talent no one can match. Tribal societies employ a rare kind of genius at finding people's talents, whether we're talking about Two-Spirits, or the connection between shamanism and schizophrenia. A lousy hunter would have very little to say about hunting schemes, but since he's a genius toolmaker, everyone will listen to what he has to say about what kind of tools to make for next year. Likewise, that great hunter will have a lot to say about the local deer herd, but when it comes to making tools, it'll be time to shut up, because everyone knows he couldn't knap a flint knife to save his life.

The key to egalitarianism is that equality does not mean uniformity.

What is the herbal basis for Prozac? Or Lithium?

I said most, but I also said most effective. The ramifications of SSRI's are hotly debated. Meanwhile, aspirin, "the wonder drug that works wonders," comes from the willow bark used by Native Americans for headaches.

If you ever needed surgery or other serious procedure, would you prefer to have it done in a Western hospital, or would you prefer to use traditional medicine?

Personally? Traditional medicine.

Hmm. What's the word that I'm looking for here? Oh I remember, "Bullshit". We're getting deep into timecube territory here.

Or the anthropology of medicine. A good universtiy library should have a shelf there backing me up on this.

Snark aside, do you really think these are the only two options?

Not at all. Primitive societies actually enjoyed lives that were both longer and happier.

We reject mass society for practical and philosophical reasons.

Mass society lies at the root of most of our current problems. Humans are fundamentally incapable of dealing with such massive societies. The means we invent to try to do so--from hierarchy to market economies--are all meant to divorce as much as possible from the social context into which tribal societies, the societies humans evolved with, embedded every aspect of their lives. That makes our society inherently anti-social, and it creates massive populations of trained sociopaths.

...but the symbolic mode of expression and understanding is certainly limited and its over-dependence leads to objectification, alienation, and a tunnel vision of perception.

On my own site, I've often challenged Zerzan's critique of symbolism. Primitive societies have a rich symbolic life. Symbolic thought is necessary, but not sufficient, for the emergence of hierarchy. You could just as well blame the opposable thumb.
posted by jefgodesky at 2:22 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

In fact, most of our most effective pharmaceuticals simply turn indigenous herbal remedies into pills. Primitive societies were even performing brain surgery all the way back in the Mesolithic.

Seriously, every time a thread like this comes up - in came up in the Pomo tribe thread a week ago and in came up again a week before that, this argument shows up.

This is stupid and completely false. To the extent that occaisionally a chemical is discovered in a plant, it is identified, extracted, synthesized in mass quantities and delivered as medicine seperately from all the other chemicals in the plants.

And lest you think you are clever for pointing this out, you aren't. Most medicines simply replace or introduce a chemical process that supposed to occur normally anyway.

Furthermore, the hierarchy argument has been discussed on mefi before.

You know why the primitive appeals to people? Because it's easy. It takes a lifetime of study to understand why a Mozart symphony is qualitatively different that a polyphonic pygmy song. IT takes a lifetime of study to understand why medicine is not just picking herbs and boiling them, or to understand why the stars move as they do and what that means. These things are hard.

The difference between civilization and the primitive is that civilization appreciates that pursuing the understanding of these difficult things will lead to an improved and enriched life for all. The primitive does not pursue these things because they are hard, and rather concocts a story from whole cloth into which things can fit.

Those of you endorsing the idea of returning to the primitive, please explain why any of us should want to agree with you. What is the benefit of returning to the primitive?
posted by Pastabagel at 2:25 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

jefgodesky, I don't agree with you, but I want to laud your consistently on-topic responses in this thread, and your apparent resistance to wiseassery. Speaking as a wiseass, myself.
posted by everichon at 2:28 PM on April 11, 2007

stenseng -

when people aren't spending all of their free time scratching around for sustenance...

Hunter-gatherer's have more leisure time than farmers.

The linked article is very interesting (and I'm pretty sure has appeared here before). Between hunter-gathering and pre-industrial life, hunter-gathering seems like a clear win. Industrial life is another matter. Sure, if I get appendicitis, I can have it taken care of surgically, but I'm not a randomly chosen member of the human race. Pick a person at random from the 6 billion to choose from and they'll likely meet the same end as our theoretical Bushman.

Still, the last 100 years has brought human lifespans past their previous, pre-agricultural high (although the Bushman still works a lot less). The question is, is it sustainable? And the lifestyle that most people here are contrasting with hunter gathering - the wealthy, western one - since it isn't universalizable (certainly, the average chinese citizen isn't going to be using oil like the average american), isn't the right one to compare against. It's like claiming that feudalism is better than hunter-gathering, since in a feudal society you get to live in a castle and have servants.
posted by bonecrusher at 2:28 PM on April 11, 2007

jefgodesky's arguments in this thread are pretty much why anarchists laugh themselves silly at primitivists.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:31 PM on April 11, 2007

Hunter-gatherers may have had more leisure time than I do, but I would quicky die without the New Yorker. And Powells. And MeFi, for that matter.
posted by everichon at 2:32 PM on April 11, 2007

If you ever needed surgery or other serious procedure, would you prefer to have it done in a Western hospital, or would you prefer to use traditional medicine?

Personally? Traditional medicine.

Then, my friend, you are either a liar or an idiot. You'd rather get a traditional remedy for coronary artery blockage rather than an anticoagulant or a bypass? What would that remedy be? A traditional remedy for prostate cancer or brain cancer perhaps? How about a traditional remedy for schizophrenia? Know any good folk remedies for the measles? Polio? Smallpox?
posted by Pastabagel at 2:32 PM on April 11, 2007

Yeah, I thought this stuff was a good idea... back when I was 15.
posted by Afroblanco at 2:33 PM on April 11, 2007

Sure, there are lots of naturally hierarchical animals, but Homo sapiens isn't one of them.

I'd like to point out that a hierarchy is not the same as a pecking order. A pecking order is what you observe in chickens and chimps. A hierarchy is what you observe in human civilization. A pecking order is when one member of a group gains a monopoly on a certain resource. Or it may be that several members do, and they arrange in a queue -- a pecking order. A stable linear arrangement in time. In contrast, a hierarchy is when labor is divided into higher-level tasks, like management, and lower-level tasks, like digging a hole. Is there a linear succession here? Is the higher-level task always completed before the lower-level task? Or vice versa maybe? It's not so clear. I really wish more people acknowledged this distinction. Clarity is very important when you are discussing sensitive ideas like the fate of civilization.
posted by Laugh_track at 2:40 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitive societies have a rich symbolic life. Symbolic thought is necessary, but not sufficient, for the emergence of hierarchy. You could just as well blame the opposable thumb.

Oh, I do. I do. It's the root of all opposition.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:41 PM on April 11, 2007

Meanwhile, aspirin, "the wonder drug that works wonders," comes from the willow bark used by Native Americans for headaches.

No, it doesn't. Aspirin, the kind you get in a store comes from, surprise, phenol from coal tar. Salicylic acid was discovered in willow bark, but and here's the point, it would be impossible to obtain aspirin in quantities useful and inexpensive to the world by relying on willow trees.

Again the difference between the primitive and civilization is highlighted here. The primitive happens upon the properties of willow bark, but doesn't explore it further than that. Science using a single process is not only able to determine what it is in willow bark that is useful, but can also synthesize entirely different chemicals that do what aspirin does but better, and without the side effects. Please identify a primitive society that developed tylenol.
posted by Pastabagel at 2:44 PM on April 11, 2007

Well, this is certainly the kind of non-society I want to live in:

...Naturally, he is quickly discovered, since there isn't all that much to steal (and even less that wouldn't be freely given, to improve a friendship in which actual wealth in such a society lies), and that person is now booted out. It's very difficult surviving in the wilderness alone, so he's dead by the end of the year.

Yes, to be completely dependent upon my small band and to fear being banished should the whim strike them. That would be awesome!

From what reading I've done of the Saharan nomads (admittedly in the 1800s, although Western civilization had not always had a significant impact upon them), their lives seemed completely miserable (I don't know how they are today), impoverished, tenuous, and in constant jeopardy. And they treated most outsiders with complete savagery, robbing them and then either killing or enslaving them. Not sure that's an admirable model.
posted by Midnight Creeper at 2:48 PM on April 11, 2007

"Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time than farmers."


I sincerely doubt that, and one article sure ain't gonna change my mind.
posted by stenseng at 2:59 PM on April 11, 2007

This is stupid and completely false. To the extent that occaisionally a chemical is discovered in a plant, it is identified, extracted, synthesized in mass quantities and delivered as medicine seperately from all the other chemicals in the plants.

This is stupid and completely false. It rambles over the fact that divorced from the rest of the plant's chemical context, the "active ingredient" often entails crippling side-effects that sometimes overwhelm the drug's effectiveness. Herbs can have side-effects, too, but as a rule, they tend to be much less severe. Just as with our own drugs, knowledge about the herbs used is essential, but I think this should suffice to show that there's been a lot more give-and-take than improvement involved.

Anthropologists of medicine have yet to find any ethnomedicine, including our own, that can be proven to be more or less effective than any other. Despite that, every culture, including our own, believes its own medicine to be superior, and argues for its superiority in terms of its own etiology and assumptions--a cultural tautology we call "ethnocentrism." It is as baseless as it is universal.

And lest you think you are clever for pointing this out, you aren't. Most medicines simply replace or introduce a chemical process that supposed to occur normally anyway.

Obviously; I thought we were more interested in what was real, I didn't realize that "cleverness" was being evaluated as well.

You know why the primitive appeals to people? Because it's easy. It takes a lifetime of study to understand why a Mozart symphony is qualitatively different that a polyphonic pygmy song. IT takes a lifetime of study to understand why medicine is not just picking herbs and boiling them, or to understand why the stars move as they do and what that means. These things are hard.

Holy hell, that's such a piece of ethnocentrism it makes me queasy. Spoken truly as someone who knows nothing about herbalism, much less any system of art or music that doesn't come from Europe. You know why the civilized appeals to people? Because it's easy. It takes a lifetime of study to understand why a Pygmy song is qualitatively different than some Mozart symphony. It takes a lifetime of study to understand why medicine is more than just popping people full of drugs, or to understand how to create a sane society that doesn't rely on the madness of constant growth. These things are hard.

The difference between civilization and the primitive is that civilization appreciates that pursuing the understanding of these difficult things will lead to an improved and enriched life for all. The primitive does not pursue these things because they are hard, and rather concocts a story from whole cloth into which things can fit.

You make it sound like science, or art, or philosophy are the sole domains of civilized societies. They are most emphatically not. They are the universal heritage of the whole human race, civilized or not, and as old as the Upper Paleolithic. Primitive societies have art and music and knowledge completely comparable to our own and it is, quite frankly, nothing short of straight-out racism and ignorance that could ever lead anyone to believe otherwise. If you are simply ignorant of the depth and richness of primitive cultures, then I urge you to investigate them further. I know Europe's cultural heritage as well as you seem to, but you do not seem to have any awareness at all of the achievements of other societies. If, on the other hand, your ethnocentric salute here is as racist as it seems, then I am truly disgusted. Europe does not hold the one right way for everyone to live, and the rest of the world does not judge its cultural success by how far it falls from Europe's shining example of endemic warfare and plague.

Those of you endorsing the idea of returning to the primitive, please explain why any of us should want to agree with you. What is the benefit of returning to the primitive?

Improved quality of life, while retaining equal (or sometimes greater) richness in knowledge, medicine, philosophy, art, and every other area of cultural endeavor. Moreover, it is the only form of human society proven to work in the long term, and the only one that does not actively destroy its ecological foundation.

Pick a person at random from the 6 billion to choose from and they'll likely meet the same end as our theoretical Bushman.

Appendicitis and major colon diseases are almost totally absent in primitive African regions, but as these natives move to more developed countries, these diseases rapidly increase.

Appendicitis is caused because humans do not have the biology to digest wheat except in the most nominal sense. Many of our common ailments stem from this fact. So, this is something of a straw man--denouncing primitive life because it cannot address a health issue that it eliminates from ever occuring. You'll find this is extremely common; just as important as the equally effective medicine of primitive societies is the fact that they don't make us sick, so there's less to cure. Although, primitive societies do perform regular, successful surgery when such things do arise (which is much more rare than among us, for reasons like this; it's really amazing what the human body can do when it's operating in its evolutionary context, rather than swimming upstream from it).

Still, the last 100 years has brought human lifespans past their previous, pre-agricultural high (although the Bushman still works a lot less).

Only in the most industrialized, elite countries, and we've observed a general trend in rising longevity since the Upper Paleolithic. Unfortunately, the only extant hunter-gatherers we could compare this to live in some of the world's most marginal ecologies. Still, once the cultural variables are accounted for, their life expectancies come close to that of Americans'. That is to say, hunter-gatherers in the worst possible ecological context live nearly as long as the wealthiest, longest-lived elite of our modern civilization. So, I think there's some ambiguity here.

jefgodesky's arguments in this thread are pretty much why anarchists laugh themselves silly at primitivists.

Would you care to elaborate?

Hunter-gatherers may have had more leisure time than I do, but I would quicky die without the New Yorker. And Powells. And MeFi, for that matter.

Remember, you also get a real, close-knit community, too. You'd rather have MeFi, than a rich oral tradition and a real community? I find that rather sad if it's true, but I suspect you're kidding yourself. Far too many people react to primitivism with, "How will I manage without my crutch!" forgetting that it also means taking the cast off.

You'd rather get a traditional remedy for coronary artery blockage rather than an anticoagulant or a bypass?

Well, in a primitive society, I'd never have that coronary artery blockage to begin with, which I find much preferable, don't you? Why would I have to be a liar or an idiot to not prefer to have such a condition and then need such invasive surgery?

A traditional remedy for prostate cancer or brain cancer perhaps?

Granted, primitive societies tend not to come up with remedies for afflictions they don't suffer.

How about a traditional remedy for schizophrenia?

That's shamanism. You integrate that person into your society and give them the means to turn it to their advantage.

Know any good folk remedies for the measles? Polio? Smallpox?

Again, those are zoonotic diseases, the product of animal domestication. Primitive societies only get those diseases when they run into civilized people.

Salicylic acid was discovered in willow bark, but and here's the point, it would be impossible to obtain aspirin in quantities useful and inexpensive to the world by relying on willow trees.

Which indicates the problems of mass society, not herbal medicine. For an individual Native American, chewing on willow bark is as effective as aspirin. Does it scale to a population of billions? Of course not, but that wasn't the goal, either.

Science using a single process is not only able to determine what it is in willow bark that is useful, but can also synthesize entirely different chemicals that do what aspirin does but better, and without the side effects.

Like the upset stomach--nobody gets that from aspirin. Actually, you don't get it from willow bark. There's another chemical in willow bark that stops that from happening, but it was cut out when it was isolated for aspirin. Tylenol put that same chemical back in, to better emulate chewing on a piece of willow bark.

Again the difference between civilization and the primitive is illustrated. The primitive knows a good thing when he sees it, while the civlized person needs to play god and inevitably screw it up because a single human being can never account for all the variables that evolution has already taken care of.

Yes, to be completely dependent upon my small band and to fear being banished should the whim strike them. That would be awesome!

Well, that's certainly a fairly Machiavellian way to take it, except banishment wasn't really the kind of thing you did on a whim. Betray the whole band, sure, but you might as well paint our society as hellish because we executed Timothy McVeigh. I do paint our society as pretty hellish, but not for that.

From what reading I've done of the Saharan nomads (admittedly in the 1800s, although Western civilization had not always had a significant impact upon them), their lives seemed completely miserable

I agree. They were pastoralists (a kind of agriculture), living in the Sahara. Not exactly primitive.

I sincerely doubt that, and one article sure ain't gonna change my mind.

OK, try an introductory anthropology book, because it's very well attested, the kind of thing you normally find on an anthro 101 midterm.
posted by jefgodesky at 3:01 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

YOU ARE ALL CIVILIZED STUPID!!!
posted by pyramid termite at 3:06 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

OK, try an introductory anthropology book,

Printed on a computerized printing press powered by electricty, natch.

(look jeff, you wanna go out in the woods and cavort with the fucking squirrels, be my guest, but don't be sanctimonious about it)
posted by jonmc at 3:11 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivism can't ever work unless the entire planet agrees on it as a whole, which will never happen. Why? Primitive societies have no ability to defend themselves against technological ones. If the entire first world voted to return to a tribal existence, rogue states like North Korea would have a field day conquering the place. You'd either have to scour them from the Earth with your weapons before you dismantled them, or keep weapons around after (in which case they'd quickly fail or become obsolete in the absence of the science, industry, and economy needed to maintain them.) One solution is unacceptable, and the other won't work.

Furthermore, primitivism means death for the majority of mankind. The planet cannot even come close to supporting 6 billion hunter-gatherers. Also, this population density cannot be maintained without modern medicine and hygiene. If we all went back to living in tribes, at least 98% of the population will starve or be wiped out by diseases. It's even possible that we'd all be wiped out - the transition back could easily be enough to kill everyone if a strong plague got out of hand.

Finally, primitivism is temporary. Without technology, history cannot be maintained. Maybe you can carve rocks or tell tales, but will those survive for 2000 years? Will they survive the loss of the historians to disease or famine? The memory of technology will be lost, and it will inevitably rise again.
posted by Mitrovarr at 3:12 PM on April 11, 2007

Well, the specifically anarchist critique of primitivism is that its implementation would involve the deaths of the vast majority of the human population, its anti-intellectualism, its anti-human demand that humanity embrace modes of living which involve a shorter lifespan, an embrace of bullshit primitive mysticism, and a general contempt for humanity. None of that is even vaguely in line with anarchist principles. Hell, have a more complete answer.

There's also the fact that you fuckers keep calling yourselves anarchists when nine tenths of you don't know who Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, Buenaventura Durruti, Nestor Makhno, Emma Goldman, or any of a long list of anarchist writers are (Bob Black and John Zerzan don't count). You're not anarchists, and sweet holy fuck am I sick of hearing about "green anarchy".
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:16 PM on April 11, 2007

Also,

Like the upset stomach--nobody gets that from aspirin. Actually, you don't get it from willow bark. There's another chemical in willow bark that stops that from happening, but it was cut out when it was isolated for aspirin. Tylenol put that same chemical back in, to better emulate chewing on a piece of willow bark.

You don't know what you're talking about. Tylenol isn't aspirin- it's an entirely different chemical called acetominophen.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:18 PM on April 11, 2007

Primitivism can't ever work unless the entire planet agrees on it as a whole, which will never happen.

This goes for nearly all "isms". Except maybe totalitarianism. Then it wouldn't matter if anyone agrees on it. Communism would work if everyone agreed to make it work. Capitalism would work for everybody too if everyone agreed on it. I don't believe any of these would ever work on a global scale.
posted by bobobox at 3:24 PM on April 11, 2007

I can understand the impulse behind this. I'm actually a primitive technology buff, myself. As in, I study it as a subject. As an answer, I find it lacking. Thing is, neither primitivism nor anarchy scale well. Even Libertarianism (anarchy lite, IMO) is idealistic. And any social model that depends on an idealized version of human nature is inherently unstable. So barring forced reeducation, wilderness survival, or SHTF scenarios, I don't see this subject as anything more than wishful thinking or intellectual curiosity. And no - I can't prove any of these opinions, except to point out that history isn't exactly brimming with successful examples of dense populations willingly relinquishing order.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:32 PM on April 11, 2007

Furthermore, primitivism means death for the majority of mankind.

And I bet that would suit the bulk of these deluded Trustfarians just fine.
posted by MikeMc at 3:40 PM on April 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

Printed on a computerized printing press powered by electricty, natch.

(look jeff, you wanna go out in the woods and cavort with the fucking squirrels, be my guest, but don't be sanctimonious about it)

The anthropology text book made by the computerized printing press powered by electricity only being necessary to correct the ignorance of primitive societies, which we would not need if the civilization with its electricity and computerized printing press and its anthropology text books had never existed. I don't think this line of argument is going well for you; no matter how much you try, using the artifacts of civilization to begin to address some of the incalculable damage civilization has done will never make it hypocritical.

Primitivism can't ever work unless the entire planet agrees on it as a whole, which will never happen. Why? Primitive societies have no ability to defend themselves against technological ones.

This is kinda sorta not really true. When a civilization is in its anabolic growth stage, no primitive society can withstand it. It is driven to consume all other ways of life, even if the individuals in it might not want to. However, in catabolic collapse, the trend reverses itself, and primitive societies prosper over civilized ones.

Furthermore, primitivism means death for the majority of mankind. The planet cannot even come close to supporting 6 billion hunter-gatherers.

True. In fact, the only thing that can support 6.5 billion people is industrialized agriculture--which is unsustainable, and destroys its own ecological foundation at a terrifying rate. So, in the long term, industrial agriculture cannot support 6.5 billion people, either, because it isn't sustainable. Only sustainable subsistence technologies can provide an ongoing basis for a society, and none of the sustainable methods can support billions of people. It's a classic example of overshoot (again, I reference Catton's book), and it makes this argument a complete red herring. No, primitivism cannot support 6.5 billion people, but then, nothing can.

Without technology, history cannot be maintained.

Wrong. Oral traditions are incredibly good at preserving memories.

...but will those survive for 2000 years?

They have before. We have cave art from 40,000 years ago in Europe, and older in Africa. The Bushmen painted rock art 2,000 years ago, and they still know what it means. Anthropologists couldn't figure them out until they finally asked the natives. Oral tradition is extremely effective, in some ways even more effective than writing. See Ong's Literality & Orality.

Will they survive the loss of the historians to disease or famine?

Primitive societies have far less disease (most of our diseases are zoonotic epidemics), and famine--the way we know it--is veritably the product of agriculture (see Richard Manning's Against the Grain).

The memory of technology will be lost, and it will inevitably rise again.

Depends on the technology in question. Technology arises when it is useful, and when it is possible. Today, there are no more near-surface deposits of fossil fuels or economic metals; that's why we mine so deeply for them. Geological time will pass before they're pushed up to the surface again, by which time we'll be an entirely different species altogether. As it is, you need an industrial society in place in order to extract the resources an industrial society needs. Or, to quote Sir Fred Hoyle in Of Men and Galaxies:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.

It's unfortunate that Sir Hoyle was such a product of his time and called complex societies "high intelligence" (with its racist implication that extant hunter-gatherers are just too stupid, to say nothing of the empirical evidence that such "high intelligence" is pretty dumb on a lot of levels), but you get the point.

Well, the specifically anarchist critique of primitivism is that its implementation would involve the deaths of the vast majority of the human population...

Yes, and if you take primitivism, as I do, as the best solution to the fact that the vast majority of the human population is going to die, just like any other species would in the same ecological situation, then much of that critique evaporates, I think.

...its anti-intellectualism....

Where? I can see it in the Green Anarchy Collective, but there's more to primitivism than just them. One of the things I've most commonly extolled about primitive societies is their rich intellectual life.

....its anti-human demand that humanity embrace modes of living which involve a shorter lifespan....

No, no, we're opposed to civilization, which is anti-human (in that it contradicts the context of human evolution and the cultural expectations we developed in that context), and involves a dramatically shorter lifespan (look up "Dickson's Mounds," for example).

...an embrace of bullshit primitive mysticism...

Well, I can somewhat confess to that, but I have to say, such an embrace came quite reluctantly, and only because the evidence overwhelmed me. Again, I cannot recommend Abram's Spell of the Sensuous heartily enough.

...and a general contempt for humanity.

Primitivism is the only outlook I've yet found that doesn't have such a contempt for humanity. It suggests that humanity, in its evolutionary context, is as harmless as a wolf pack or a pride of lions, that we have a place in this world and aren't some evil alien species just overrunning it, and that we can have that place again. It's the Hobbesian assumptions of civilization, or the unproven thought experiments of most anarchist "utopias," that I find such great contempt for humanity, and the unspoken assumption that we are the uniquely failed products of evolution. While the whole world around us operates with such beautiful, awe-inspiring wonder, we alone are so imperfect that we need dreamed-up schemes to make our species work, never mind our million year track record to the contrary. Now that is contempt for humanity.

There's also the fact that you fuckers keep calling yourselves anarchists when nine tenths of you don't know who Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, Buenaventura Durruti, Nestor Makhno, Emma Goldman, or any of a long list of anarchist writers are

I consider myself "anarchist" only coincidentally (you'll note I've mostly called myself a "primitivist" here), in that I don't think humanity should have any kind of rule over it. But I am familiar with all of those people. I can't answer for anyone else, though, but you did say "jefgodesky's arguments in this thread are pretty much why anarchists laugh themselves silly at primitivists." In your elaboration, I don't see much about any arguments I've made.

You don't know what you're talking about. Tylenol isn't aspirin- it's an entirely different chemical called acetominophen.

You're right, I was wrong on that point. Acetominophen (a.k.a. paracetamol) was first synthesized when the cinchona tree became scarce, starting in the 1880s, in part due to over-harvesting for medicinal uses.
posted by jefgodesky at 3:42 PM on April 11, 2007 [4 favorites]

jefgodesky - do you have any data on what the average lifespan of pre-historic hunter-gatherers was? Because I've never seen anything that claimed it was anywhere near today's global average of around 60 years at birth.

And, yes, jonmc. We all get that jefgodesky is making claims about the superiority of a primitivist lifestyle without actually living one himself. We also all know by now that you don't understand why that is completely irrelevant to whether or not what he claims is true or not. Instead of boring us all with another emotional tirade, amuse yourself by reading this.
posted by bonecrusher at 3:43 PM on April 11, 2007

The primitivists are probably right. It's almost certainly the case that civilization has had a highly corrosive effect upon both humanity, as an object and an ideal, and the planet. At best one can make a utilitarian argument that 'net happiness has increased' but this is (1) likely not true (2) a stupid argument. And it's probably also the case that civilization will have even more damaging effects in the future. Even before global warming became popular it's become quite clear that we've entered into a kind of positive feedback loop resulting in ever increasing unsustainable growth, environmental damage, and debasing of human dignity. But all this being the case the primitivist prescribed solution just isn't very compelling. We don't have to resort to bullshit reasoning about population density (as if population density is a good thing to be sought after) or even silly claims that civilization is 'necessary' and 'inevitable'. In the face of primitivist critique we ought to come clean and just admit that we don't care. We want to play videogames and commute to work and enjoy all the wonderful benefits of over consumption. Nothing more and nothing less. This is our choice and if it leads to the destruction of the planet, so what? It's not like anybody else is using it. Humanity has explicitly chosen to reject the primitivist alternative and embrace a future that requires the domination and exploitation of the entire planet. We'll buy now and worry about tommorow never. Really the primitivists are just sore losers.
posted by nixerman at 3:53 PM on April 11, 2007

jefgodesky - do you have any data on what the average lifespan of pre-historic hunter-gatherers was? Because I've never seen anything that claimed it was anywhere near today's global average of around 60 years at birth.

Indeed. I went through the data in detail in "Thesis #25: Civilization reduces quality of life," part of my Thirty Theses, which I wrote largely to avoid having the same discussions over and over again. I linked it above, when I first made the claim, but it was certainly easy enough to miss.

We want to play videogames and commute to work and enjoy all the wonderful benefits of over consumption. Nothing more and nothing less.

I hope you're wrong. I hope we really do still want real communities, even if we can't articulate that need, and that we look to video games and the like to fill in the void. I think humanity's evolutionary track record indicates that.
posted by jefgodesky at 3:56 PM on April 11, 2007

Indeed. I went through the data in detail in "Thesis #25: Civilization reduces quality of life," part of my Thirty Theses, which I wrote largely to avoid having the same discussions over and over again. I linked it above, when I first made the claim, but it was certainly easy enough to miss.

It may have reduced quality of life in the long term, but the past hundred years or so have been pretty sweet.
posted by delmoi at 4:09 PM on April 11, 2007

There's also the fact that you fuckers keep calling yourselves anarchists when nine tenths of you don't know who Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, Buenaventura Durruti, Nestor Makhno, Emma Goldman, or any of a long list of anarchist writers are (Bob Black and John Zerzan don't count). You're not anarchists, and sweet holy fuck am I sick of hearing about "green anarchy".

You call yourself an anarchist? That sounds like old-fashioned Leninist vanguardism and appeals to authority. Look, I'm an anarchist (though not emphatically a primitivist, I'm sympathetic to their arguments). I have heard of these people. But this bullshit you're spewing, threatening to take away people's anarchist party cards for not being educated on the ideological line of the Central Anarchist Committee, is pure authoritarianism.

I've read Bakunin, and I think he's an asshole who has no idea what he's really advocating. I've read the other people, and I do occasionally like Goldman and Kropotkin and Malatesta. I've read the literature from the Spanish Civil War that you people always bring up. And you know what? The FAI and the CNT weren't really anarchists in any sense I can morally support. They were proletarian-dictatorship kill-the-capitalists class-warfare advocating pseudo-Marxists who occasionally had the courage to tell Stalin to fuck off. One pamphlet I read (written by "anarchists") said, literally, that if the anarchist revolution in Spain were to survive it required a revolutionary junta to lead it, as well as an elaborate system of rationing. That's not anarchism.

As long as self-proclaimed anarchists keep trotting out the dozen or so anarchist apostles with some sort of holy reverence, anarchism will remain an entirely irrelevant movement masturbating over the days of its past glory. Anarcho-syndicalism was repeatedly demonstrated to be an ineffective strategy for toppling the State, yet you still think the Wobblies and the Emma Goldmans and whatnot represent your Golden Age.

I guess it just goes to show that even the most avowedly antifascist philosophy still attracts the authoritarian personality type. I wish they would go poison the well somewhere else, but they don't, so I stay away from your godforsaken movement.
posted by nasreddin at 4:09 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

"For an individual Native American, chewing on willow bark is as effective as aspirin. "

I'd be willing to guess that if you performed a small study, and asked any indigenous peoples "would you prefer this tasty glop of willow bark here, or these two little white buffered aspirins, and a nice cup of tasty tap water," I'd be willing to guess that the number of takers of the former would be darned near zero.

I'd further be willing to bet that this would hold true with nearly any modern amenity, be it toilet paper, antibiotics, ballpoint pens, or individually wrapped snack sized granola bars.

You won't find anyone from an indigenous society, developing nation, what have you sitting back smugly all like "you guys can keep your polycotton blends and ipods, I'm totally stoked on dugout canoes, malaria, and tooth decay, thx."

All this neo-nativist anarchic stuff is intellectually masturbatory bs propagated by a bunch of upper middle class pseudo-intellectuals who've never had a cut that became terribly infected, or a broken bone that wasn't properly set, or really gone without the basic modern amenities they take so for granted, and that are a direct result of society, technology, and progress.
posted by stenseng at 4:24 PM on April 11, 2007 [2 favorites]