an introduction to post-civilized theory
by Margaret Killjoy
This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #2 in 2010, and is essentially a slightly longer rewrite of post-civ!, a collaboratively written introduction published by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness, published in 2008.
Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.
So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.
Premise One: We Hate Civilization
This civilization is, from its foundation, unsustainable. It probably cannot be salvaged, and what’s more, it would be undesirable to do so. When we’re discussing civilization, we’re discussing the entirety of the modern world’s organizational structures and approaches to culture. We’re talking about the legal and societal codes that dictate “proper” behavior. We’re talking about the centralizing and expanding urges of political and economic empire.
Civilization is destroying all life on earth. It’s unsustainable: growth-based economies and societies always are. Civilization is nigh unredeemable: there seems to be an infinitesimally slim chance that civilization will drop its resource over-consumption and move rapidly towards a sustainable way of existing. And even if it did, we don’t want it. It would still be an imposition on our freedom.
Civilization has been defined in all sorts of ways, but none of them actually make it sound very good when you think much about it. My dictionary defines civilization as “the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced.” Aside from being a sort of useless definition, this points out the prejudice inherent in civilization. It says: “We are advanced. You are primitive. What’s more, history and development is purely linear in nature, progress only moves forward, and any deviation from the course we are on is regressive.”
Another working definition of civilization can be derived from Wikipedia, which often provides the sort of cultural consensus on a given term. Wikipedia describes civilization as “a society defined as a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities … Compared with less complex structures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy.” This definition, too, points out the flaws in civilization. An intricate social hierarchy? Why have we all chosen a world that puts up with that kind of crap?
Derrick Jensen, an anti-civilization theorist (but not a post-civilized one), has proposed another useful definition of civilization: “a culture–that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts–that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state).” Which of course leads us to ask what, exactly, a city is. Derrick defines a city, for the purpose of his definition of civilization, as: “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.”
And that, perhaps, is the point of all of this. If a place requires resources from elsewhere, everything is fine when they can trade for them. But when their farming neighbors experience a drought and can’t provide a surplus for trade? Then you have war. Great.
We hate civilization.
Premise Two: We’re Not Primitivists
It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought–important work, mind you–has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.
Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that’s almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses–whether warfare or simple ecocide–but that doesn’t make technology (“The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”) inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.
Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.
Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.
What’s more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism (note that what our society’s view of what tribalism is is mostly based on faulty, euro-centric anthropology), can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid “customs,” and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.
We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don’t want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.
We are not primitivists.
Premise Three: We Are Post-Civilized
It is therefore desirable to imagine and enact a post-civilized culture. This is something we can do here and now in the thrashing endgame of civilization.
There are so many false dichotomies in the world. The amateur and the professional musician both have so much to offer, and we post-civilized folks generally cultivate both specialized and generalized skills. Someone has got to get good at lens grinding–and optometry–but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to cook a decent meal, or help weed your neighbor’s garden.
One of civilization’s greatest faults is its attempt to homogenize a global culture, to spread one set of ideas of how everything–from governance to architecture to agriculture to music–must be done “properly.” But if you build flat-roofed houses in cold climates, snow is going to build up and your roof is going to collapse. If you fell trees from a hillside the same as you do in the valleys, your soil is going to erode.
So moving towards post-civilization–with or without industrial collapse–is a matter of looking around oneself, one’s community, and one’s landbase, and determining what is appropriate. What this means is that, in the here and now, there are parts of civilized culture we can utilize to our benefit that we might not be able to two generations after a collapse. For those in the first world, our most abundant resource is trash.
Good food can be rescued and eaten. Rotten food can be composted and used to build raised bed gardens atop otherwise poisonous city soil. Paper that is blank on one or both sides can be bound into notebooks. Other paper can be pulped in a blender, spread onto screens, and pressed with a repurposed hydraulic car jack. Roadkill can be skinned and butchered. Electric toys can be scavenged, their circuit boards and motors repurposed. Used vegetable oil can be rescued out of grease traps and used to power our cars or even our generators.
And the critics will say this can’t work forever, and they’ll look confused when we nod our heads in agreement. Because we’ll adapt with the shifting landscape, because what works in one time or place may not work elsewhere or elsewhen.
Civilization thinks that culture naturally trickles down from the civil to the savage, from the urban to the rural. We don’t.
We are post-civilized.
If We Had Our Way
What does a city look like if it’s not a city anymore? The concept of the city, as an entity of its own with specified boundaries, centralized government, and the routine importation of necessities, must be done away with. But we’re not all going to scatter out into the surrounding countryside, oh no.
The post-civilized city (Non-city? Urban area? Terminology is a bit hard.) might look like a city would if you ignored its government. The society would consist of smaller groups that retain their individual identities but are capable of working together for the common good.
We post-civilized aim to prove that decentralization of our culture, economies, and politics is both possible and desirable. Every smaller group (some might use the word tribe, but I personally shy from it) would make its own decisions, maintain its autonomy, and solve problems in the ways that suit its constituency. Some might turn to high technology to meet their needs and desires. Others might live more simply. But the borders between the groups will most likely be blurred, with individuals, groups, and families moving between social spheres. Honestly, it would socially be much like today, if you removed the hierarchy between groups and actively avoided the centralizing influence of civilized culture.
Will these groups ever fight? Probably. No system is perfect, and it is better to admit that forthrightly than pretend it is otherwise. We paint no utopia here. But there have been movements in the past that have developed political structures to allow groups with diverse interests to interact peacefully. One of those movements that we are influenced by is syndicalism.
Syndicalism is an economic system totally outside of the capitalist/state-socialist dichotomy. It suggests that a federation of collectivized trade unions might promote mutual aid between members. For a bit of history of when syndicalism successfully functioned in a developed nation, look into the Spanish Civil War.
Mutual aid, then, is the opposite of competition. Wikipedia describes it as “the economic concept of voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.” One of the earliest anarchists–and evolutionary biologists–was Peter Kropotkin, who advocated against Darwin’s suggestion that nature was simply the war of one against all. Instead, he argued, intra-species cooperation is at least as much an evolutionary force as competition. What’s more, modern science has finally come around and has begun to believe him.
Now, we’re not exactly syndicalists, either. Syndicalism is a lovely idea, but we’re not talking about trade unions, and we’re not talking about industrialization. We should cling to the tenants of historical anarchism no more than we should cling to second-wave feminism, or, for that matter, civilization. No, we’re talking about dynamic groups of people coming together organically to make the few decisions that would impact the non-city at large.
We’re talking about the steampunks over here perfecting solar distilleries by use of Fresnel lenses while another group of bike enthusiasts over there spends their time racing, doing courier work for other groups, and forging bicycles out of found pipe. A semi-nomadic clique of teenagers will move out into the wilds of the abandoned suburbs and herd goats, while a hermit whiles her time growing potatoes in stacked tires and recording classical piano onto wax cylinders.
Someone is going to wire up his Super Nintendo to a solar panel array, and folks from all walks of life are going to come over to play Street Fighter, or just to watch. We’re all going to grow most of our own food, and we’re all going to deal with our own trash, wash our own dishes.
The Collapse
And of course, if we had it our way we would move past civilization as peacefully as possible, as non-destructively as possible. We would organize from the bottom up. We’d present solutions that are so reasonable that those in power with ethics will join us and those without ethics will see their economic might dwindle away as more people refuse to participate in civilized exchange.
But this isn’t likely, to be honest. Our society is on a collision course with history. It’s possible that the only question is which will collapse first: industrial civilization or the earth’s ability to sustain human life. If that’s the case, then we’d better hope (or act) for the former.
The collapse of industrial civilization, if it comes, will be horrible. Not one of us, not even those of us who secretly or openly long for the apocalypse, will enjoy it. But contrary to Hollywood lies, the best in people often comes out in crisis. Nothing brings a neighborhood together like a blackout; nothing gets people to sharing like food shortages. (What, you thought we’d all hoard our food and then duke it out with shotguns, kill or be killed, neighbors setting fire to one another’s houses? Humans don’t always do that. What do you think we are, civilized?)
But if our economy doesn’t give way, and we don’t figure out cold fusion (as well as a massive re-stocking of the world’s oceans), we’ll face something much, much worse. Ecological collapse will shatter the world as we know it. If any of us are alive when the dust has cleared, nothing will be the same.
We need to be done with civilization as soon as possible, lest civilization destroy us all.
In The Meantime
We want to not be civilized any longer. It’s time to move on. We want to reject crazy hierarchies and delusional economics, colonialism and nation-states. But it just so happens that we aren’t given much of a chance to opt out. Civilization has never, not once in its history, allowed room for those who aren’t civilized to flourish. It’s to the degree that you might think this a defining characteristic of civilization: civilization is so afraid of being wrong that it simply cannot abide by others who live in other fashions.
And even if we did successfully opt out, that wouldn’t stop civilization from destroying the earth.
But let’s be optimists again for a second. The earth is going to die or the earth is not going to die. Civilization is going to fall, or civilization is not going to fall. What are we going to do, here and now, in our lives?
I don’t want to get into how one might get involved in the epic battle to save the earth, to destroy civilization, to prevent or promote the collapse of this or that. Those are the sorts of ethical choices that one must make for oneself.
But I will encourage that you find or develop a post-civilized lifestyle. In a way, it’s easy. Close your eyes, and imagine who you would be without social constraints. What would you do if you were dependant upon only yourself, your friends, and the resources you can find around yourself. What would you wear? What would you eat? Perhaps the more important questions are subtler: how would you treat your friends? How would you like to be treated?
In the here and now, we learn survival skills: skinning and tanning and wire-stripping, archery and gunpowder-making. Herbalism and acupuncture, yes, but we also study the application (and making) of antibiotics, methods of surgery and dentistry. We permaculture, we rewild, and we scavenge the urban, suburban, and rural landscapes alike, learning what it means to be sustainable in a dying world. We tear up our lawns and leave only gardens. Of course, one day, we’re going to tear up the pavement and leave only bikepaths.
We practice community responses to problems within our subculture, like how to deal with physical and sexual assault without involving the police. We learn about trauma (the hard way, most of the time) and how to deal with it. We keep chickens and ducks, we eat dandelions and cattails.
We live, as much as we can, as though civilization were a blight that is behind us already. And this, more than any writing, will be our propaganda. Because yes, you can live this way. And yes, it is better. A meal means so much more when you grow or gather it yourself, and friends are so much closer when they’re treated as equals. Feral in a tailcoat, that’s us. When we look at the world around us, we take what we need and compost the rest.
Tags: Dodgem Logic, Margaret Killjoy
Hey Maggie, great article, just a few comments/questions:
“Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that’s almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world.”
*So I agree to the extent that all peoples use technology, but how do you feel about the concept of no technology being neutral, that there are hidden factors in every technology , that either identify it as life-affirming or destructive? One of the places these factors can often be found is in the manufacture/scale of any given technology. It’s almost a totally safe bet to say that if a given technology cannot be manufactured on a community based human scale, it probably is not life affirming. For example, in the case of something like solar panels, a technology one might initially view as life affirming, due to the fact that for its manufacture it requires a mining infrastructure and all that that entails, it is actually aligned with the destructive side of things. I don’t know, sort of rambling at this point and not sure how well I expressed my point, but I’m tired and moving on.
“Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.”
*I would suggest that agriculture IS inherently annual monoculture (agri : root- ager: field culture) versus horticulture (root: hortus – garden culture), and that permaculture/agroforestry/forest gardening is a form of horticulture. So I think agriculture, in its annual monocrop orientation, can be sustainable at best with the best composting practices available to replace what you take out of the system at harvest, whereas permacultural forest gardening (planting perennial polycultures of multipurpose plants that mimic the community structure and physical structure of healthy biological communities within their give
n bioregion) can be truly regenerative by building soil and fertility.
see this video: “Why Permaculture Can Save the World, and Humanity, but Not Civilization” by Toby Hemenway (author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Homescale Permaculture) http://nicholas.duke.edu/hemenway/
“What does a city look like if it’s not a city anymore? The concept of the city, as an entity of its own with specified boundaries, centralized government, and the routine importation of necessities, must be done away with. But we’re not all going to scatter out into the surrounding countryside, oh no.”
*So this is an idea I’ve grappled with and tried to wrap my head around for a while, the concept of redefining cities. So, it is clear that post-collapse, the physical architecture of cities will likely still exist, with some major alterations having been made, food growing in every space possible (ripped up streets, rooftops, vines on buildings, etc.) However, will these “cities” ever be able to produce enough food/resources/water to be able to support themselves on solely the physical land that is that city? If not, what solutions are there? Egalitarian and anarchist motivated exchange with the outlying rural foodshed (say 50-100miles radius of city for an arbitrary number)? The population inhabiting the spatial architecture of the city decreasing until that populations food/water needs can be met by permacultural practices within that spatial construct? And if thats the answer, is that the point when regardless of physical architecture and urbanity, it is no longer a city following Derricks definition of a city?
Just some thoughts. Would love to hear how you feel.
Hrmm… all good points.
Firstly, about technology. I realized at some point that I define technology quite differently than most anti-civilization/primitivist thinkers. I personally believe that primitivists have defined technology by what technology has done and not by what technology is: the usual definition seems to refer, for example, to the division of labor as an essential idea to what makes technology technology, whereas I just think the way our culture has used technology requires the division of labor. I go by a fairly dictionary definition of tech, which is “the practical application of knowledge.” the dictionary throws in “scientific knowledge,” but science is essentially a western concept and most people agree that there was technology before there was “science” per say.
As for what you suggest to be useful limitations of technology, I tend to agree. I don’t think there is much technology around at the moment that is sustainable or really worth considering for future use, but that isn’t to say that there might not be some things worth saving, and certainly we can use the concepts of technology to rebuild a more interesting and sustainable situation.
On the second point, I haven’t done enough research into the definitions of agriculture, but it’s quite possible that horticulture is indeed the word for the broader idea that I’m more interested in.
Thirdly, the role of an urban non-city. I don’t know, honestly, the numbers of people that can be supported in a post-civilized way inside the city, but I suspect, with vertical farming and potentially hydroponics, that the number is quite high. I also think that population density is going to be fairly important after civilization, because I believe that intelligent use of population density allows for a much lower ecological footprint. Honestly, the complexity of organizing overlapping tribal structures within one geographic region is more likely to be a limiting factor than space itself, in my opinion. But if space itself is an issue, then I would expect that the areas of high density might expand a bit into the areas of mid-level density (the existing suburbs) rather than depending on a food-basket approach.
(hopefully this is readable, I wrote it up in notepad and then copied it here. also I apologise for any rambling. I tend to do that.)
Technology isn’t neutral, it is a product of the culture, the dominant mindset that creates it. Much if not all of our current technology is built with the idea that the environment is this endless source of materials to be exploited and used to our advantage. But to assume that that is only way technology can operate is lack imagination. To assume a society who places higher emphasis on true sustainability and respect for this planet can not create technology that is both sustainable and respectful to this planet just isn’t something that makes sense. Yes the level or types of tech. seen today may not be seen in this society, but maybe it can and we just can’t see how because we are so blinded but what exists currently.
This has always been one of my biggest issues with primitivism. I appreciate and often agree with critiques of technology and civilization(I find Derrick Jensen’s definition of civilization really exciting and useful) but the answer they give just comes off as well reactionary. It isn’t truly an answer as much as a lack of creativity. Just because civ. and tech. have led us down this road doesn’t mean that tech. can’t work, that we can’t find ways to have agriculture and even potentially societal hubs similar to cities in a manner that is respectful of this planet and truly recognises our place as a part of it and not it’s ruler. I truly believe in the creative power of people to create something amazing, lets not limit ourselves from the outset.
I really don’t know enough about the second point farmer andy brings up to say anything, but it’s a really interesting point and i look forward to checking out the link.
As to the point about cities, I think it is certainly key to keep in mind Jensen’s definition of civilization here so as to not build inherent heirarchies into our lives. However I think it is possible to have some form of societal hub, whether or not it looks like current cities I guess is up for debate. During the spanish civil war I’m pretty sure they put together a system between federated cities and rural agricultural areas for mutual benefit that worked well. I’m sure there is an article discussing that buried somewhere on flag.blackened. I’ll try to find it later. I have had some interesting discussions with differrent folk about cities and their place in a new world, and I definitely think that there is at this point. We need to have centers of discussion and cultural exchange, these types of things are crucial.
One of the things that has always attracted me to anarchism was the idea that it would help to free us to do what we find exciting and rewarding, but that we would still live comfortably thanks to systems of mutual aid. This is not to say that there would be people who didn’t work to aquire at least some portion of their food, but I don’t think it is utopian or unreasonable to imagine mutual aid between people excited to be farmers and those excited to be artisans or others who live in “cities” however they may look. The idea of truly green cities, I mean like living inside the hanging gardens of babylon y’know? That is exciting to me, cities that would look like edible forests from afar. They probably wouldn’t be able to produce everything they needed, but hopefully they could produce quite a bit. The rest to be gained through working with folks who have chosen to live a more rural lifestyle.
I want to pick up on the point that ben made about cooperation between the rural (can we call them primitivists?) and the urban (here lets just say post civilizationists). It is interesting that the theoretical tension between the primitivists and the more urban lot also manifests itself in the actual real-life concern of how you could potentially have a city where people can eat. I think that the core of the issue rests in the worth of a city which cannot provide its own basic necessities. In a sense, the primitivists want to argue that they don’t need the city, and the post-civilizationists want to build a city that doesn’t need the country. The reality is that in a post-civilized world, there will be farms in the country, and there will be cities. They will probably be able to exist without each other. But here I want to argue that it is entirely possible, and best for everyone, if there was a relationship characterized by mutual aid. Basically, while we’re on the subject of babies and bathwater, I want to argue for here is the place of decadence in a post-civilized world.
From a primitivist perspective, cities are a drain; food, water, electricity goes in, and sewage, trash, and pollution comes out. Of course much of this has to do with the kinds of cities which capitalism has built, and which we are left with to re-envision. Still, even the best post-civilized city – such as the one that ben has described for us – would still be a massive resource drain, and at the end of the day probably not be able to feed the entire population.
This isn’t to say that there is no place for cultivation whatsoever in cities. Kitchen gardens, cultivated empty lots and rooftops, even a few vertical farms by some ambitious groups could offer up food. And really, who doesn’t love the sight of a garden growing amongst the ruins of capitalism.
But the brutal fact of the matter is that farming takes a lot of work, to the extent that you don’t really have time to do much else during the working season. Yes, you can grow food in a city, but it requires a lot more work, and a lot more resources to do so. Moreover, if you are going to devote your entire life to cultivating, harvesting and planting, why do it in a city? What is a city if it is just full of farmers? How is this any different from building a flat roofed house where it snows?
Of course there are those of a pioneering and industrious spirit who have inherited a lust for struggle and just have to turn a skyscraper into a farm, and who am I to stop them. Still, if I could ask people to just indulge me when I argue that farming is probably best done on a farm, outside of a city, (where there is already good soil and irrigation ect.) by someone who enjoys farming (take those lovely primitivists, for example).
The reason that I argue this is that we need to stop thinking of the worth of a city in terms of the pounds of potatoes that it can produce for itself. A city is a place of decadence, and those of us who love decadence, and want to carry it with us to the other side of the apocalypse, need to stop apologizing for it.
After all, there is a very real place for decadence in the post-civilized world. Without decadence, life becomes a meaningless grind of toil and despair. Decadence encompasses everything from exotic foods, to poetry performance, films and circuses. And for reasons which I won’t go into here, cities create a culture where these things occur in abundance. (Yes they can happen in the country, but here I could just apply my argument about farming in cities to decadence in the country.)
And just as cities will need food from the rural areas, rural areas rely on the cities for things that they cannot produce. Here I can get materialistic and point out killjoy’s reference to wheelchairs, medicines, and other sorts of technologies that would be difficult (not impossible) to acquire in a rural area. But instead I want to point to things that are less substantial; anyone who grew up in a rural area remembers the joy of the bookmobile (an export from the city). Moreover, we need look no further than the mobile cinemas of rural Ireland, Scotland, and surrounding Isles to see that while people enjoy living a rural lifestyle, they indulge in the decadence that a city can offer them.
Another personal example is my brother. For all intents and purposes, he is a pretty authentic primitivist. He and his wife live in a cabin in the wilderness without running water, living (mostly) on the meat that they hunt and the food that they grow. Nonetheless, they have internet access and a netflix account. Even in their primitivism, they enjoy the connection to the world that the internet offers them (most of the content of which is created in cities) and the films that cities produce and exchange. Their life is one of abundance; every time I visit them I leave with more meat than will realistically fit in my freezer. Could they live without the decadence of the internet and netflix? Yes, absolutely. But would they be happy to offer up their abundance to support a nearby city which makes that decadence possible? Even more absolutely.
So, how would this exchange even occur? Here I want to turn to one of the most decadent and ancient institutions of cities: the marketplace. Here I don’t want to go into what capitalism has made of the marketplace, or even what it was before capitalism, but I want us to envision what a marketplace might look like in post civilization city. By marketplace I mean an actual place, with stalls, or something like that.
I want us to ask, what would a marketplace look like if it were driven by the idea of a place as mutual aide and abundance? Not a place where one would go to exhaust ones resources, but a place where people go to offer up what they have grown or created or are just thinking about to share with others, and where one could go to experience everything from mangoes to old dvds the ideas of some new and strange philosopher.
We all love the idea of the street market, and I think that this needs to be the essential core of the post civilized city, sort of an ongoing festival or fair. The market could be a place where different groups in the cities met and shared, as well as where city and rural folk could mix. Basically becoming a hallmark of everything that that city has to offer.
The market would also allow cities to give to other cities, broadening networks of mutual aid, coordinating relief to disasters near and far. Also, large networks would mean that we wouldn’t have to live without things like coffee, and we’d also get to see the art that was being made in other cities around the world. It would also be a place where travelers or newcomers could begin in a city, as a place where they could share what they were doing, and draw the interest of some group or another.
In short, I would like us to think about the place of decadence in a post civilized world, and the need that both rural and urban folk have for decadence in their lives. Moreover, I think we need to look at the possibility of re-envisioning marketplaces as centers of mutual aid and decadence, which cities are uniquely positioned to host.
You touch on one of the main things that the existing post-civilization literature overlooks, which is interconnectedness. And there’s a lot to that.
The only direct thing I can say in response is that perhaps I have done a poor job of characterizing primitivists, as at least in the circles I run in, a primitivist is a bit more than just a back-to-the-lander. Most are avidly anti-farming and promote hunting/gathering as well as some smallscale gardening, but most don’t even want to be sedentary at all. At the moment, I would say post-civilized literature is kind of envision cities (or non-cities or whateverthehell) and the wilds, rather than the cities and the farmers.
At the moment, food production is indeed a lot of work, but I think that with the better application of ingenuity (not machines necessarily), that can change substantially. The wonderful thing about a properly done permaculture situation, for example, is that after setting it up, it basically takes care of itself. Imagine food forests where everything is more or less edible. The oldest literature I’ve personally seen discussing this was a book called Herland by Charlotte Gilman, but people have taken it out of the theoretical and into the real world as well.
First off, I want to thank you for clearing up my mischaracterization of primitivists. I was relying more on my knowledge of groups who have set up sedentary rural communities as a solution to the current crisis, rather than the existing literature on primitivism. I think the role that these communities will play in a post-civ world remains to be seen, given that right now they are a solution that works within the severe limitations of capitalism, property, ect. Once these limitations are no longer a factor, farms may no longer be necessary.
I also want to thank you for bringing up permaculture, which is something that I had completely neglected in my previous response. I have to admit that I have not read Herland, most of my understanding of this kind of thing comes from indigenous activists like Lee Maracle and Winona LaDuke, who argue that European settlement destroyed the abundance which existed when indigenous people were the stewards of the land.
This abundance is attested to in pretty much every European account of indigenous society. Most of these accounts mischaracterized the situation as a group of idle savages living in natural abundance, failing to recognize that the abundance had been cultivated by the people themselves. The specific techniques for this way of living are very complex, and vary from tribe to tribe, and from area to area, and so are too manifold to go into here. But it provides us with a useable past (for what its worth) when we discuss this sort of thing. Moreover, it speaks to the important role that indigenous people can play in shaping a post-civ world.
I do want to bring up the example that LaDuke discusses in All Our Relations, which is bison. Bison are straight up awesome, and before european contact, there were just about as many bison on the american plains as there are cattle today. Bison till the soil with their hooves, their matted hides collect seeds, they wallow in mud, which absorbs the seeds, and when the mud dries, the seeds grow. So we can go a long way by getting rid of cattle and allowing the bison to return.
Now I want to return to this question of primitivism and decadence, which I need to revise in the wake of your response. Clearly, the primitivists have a point. Marshall Sahlins has pretty much proven that nomadic societies live without most of the things that we hate about civilization. In nomadic societies, possessions become a burden that has to be carried, rather than something that signifies wealth. Because they don’t own land, hierarchies are far less severe than we see in civilizations. Moreover, nomadic people tend to work only four to five hours a day. Given this, the rise of agriculture can pretty much be seen as black arm day by anyone who cares about human equality and care for the earth.
So yes, I think it is fair to say that returning to a nomadic/subsistence level of living will solve most of the problems that we are faced with today. The question is, as you seem to be raising in your post, is it fair to ask for more than this?
Let us assume that in a post-civ world, we will spend around four to five hours a day procuring basic necessities (which may or may not be lessened by the existence of a thriving permaculture). What do we do with the rest of our time? Some people will do nothing. Some people enjoy hunting, some people enjoy gardening, and some people enjoy creating things. They like to make new things either through craft or creativity or both.
I think that in a post civilized world, cities will offer us a place to create in ways that are far more difficult to do in a purely nomadic society. Moreover, a marketplace would give us a place to share our creations, it would also give us a place to see what others have made, or grown, or hunted, as well. Some may live out of the marketplace for their basic necessities while they focus on a great work of some kind, and then in turn bring basic necessities to the marketplace when they are finished, or not. The point is that this kind of thing would allow human ingenuity to flourish.
The idea of a post-civilization marketplace goes a little bit beyond the idea of interconnectivity. Unfortunately, even post-civilization societies will end up creating their freaks and their outcasts, their madpeople and their misunderstood geniuses. These people don’t fare too well if they cannot access a world that is beyond the one that they come from, and if the world is just disparate groups of people with traditions that will become more entrenched over time, it will be harder and harder to see that life can be different.
On the one hand, this can be a good thing. These traditions might keep people from re-inventing horrible things like debt, or questioning why everything has to be shared. On the other hand, these traditions may keep the next generation from discovering ways of thought the likes of which our imaginations, hobbled by capitalism/patriarchy/puritanism ect, can hardly dream of.
Even in a post-civ world, there will be people who are alienated. Not in a I-want-capitalism-back kind of way, but in a way that will make whatever world we come up with seem selfish and staunchy. The marketplace would be venue where they could express their ideas and alienation in such a way that it would be heard by some, dismissed by others, and maybe find like minded people to bring forth badly needed change.
I recognize that this comes dangerously close to some kind of progress narrative. At the same time, the ideology we love, let’s call it anarchism, is one that has grown by alienated people critiquing it from unforeseen perspectives. Often times, a friend circle, a family, or tribe is a difficult place to voice one’s alienation or newfound perspective, and so the anonymity of the marketplace would provide a venue for people to express difficult truths, either in a performance, or a distributed lit journal, finding others who have experienced the same thing.
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