Things mightn't be too good now, but before civilisation wasn't life even more nasty, brutish and short?
Not according to all the evidence. Food, shelter and fuel was plentiful, and there was no work except to provide for those needs. And really is it work if you enjoy it? Collecting berries is not the same as working in a factory. Neither is stalking a deer, building a hut or finding some mushrooms. Life for wild people isn't divided into work and leisure. Everything is enjoyable in its own right, pleasing just in the doing of it.
The uncivilised way involved gathering and hunting the fruits of the forest in small, tightly woven, nomadic groups. There is no leaders, no "archies", no pyramids. Most individuals had ample skills to survive in mans natural environment as they have evolved over millions of years to adapt to life in the forest.
Their lifestyle is fluid, and they travel light on the land. Because of this they have no need for power structures, hoarding food, hierarchies and other features of farming communities.
I saw a programme on tv about The Yanomamo and they were horrible people. Aren't you totally idealising hunter gatherers?
The Yanomano were farmers - they grew bananas, plantains, and corn, in slash and burn clearings and horticulture provided 85% of their food. They were not hunter gatherer nomads, they were sedentary farmers. People here tend to have little understanding as to the different types of tribal people and group them all together as primitive or native. But, as the writer Rick Reese puts it, "Not everyone who wears feathers, G-strings, and bright red body paint is a nomadic forager".
But you're not denying there's a lot of tribal violence even with real hunter gatherers?
Yeah there's some violence - some fighting between tribes now and again - but rarely is anyone killed or seriously injured, and the whole point seems to be to let off some steam rather than hurt the neighbours. And they never take their neighbours land, they never invade, conquer and destroy. They don't force every other tribe to become the same as them.
Well, ok, we might have been happy as hunter-gatherers, but that was a long time ago and we just can't go back, we can't regress, can we?
As some Indian Chief said, "If we lose something we go back to find it." Few would deny that we are lost right now. So it makes sense to look at what worked for millions of years before civilisation and what still works for many uncivilised people around the earth still. These people are here today, so this life is not only something in the past, it is a life being lived right here, right now.
Let's think of this another way.
If atheletes want to learn they look to hunter-gatherers:
"The model for human physical activity patterns was established not in gymnasia, athletic fields, or exercise physiology laboratories, but by natural selection acting over eons of evolutionary experience. This paper examines how evolution has determined the potential for contemporary human performance, and advances the experience of recently-studied hunter-gatherers as the best available (although admittedly imperfect) indicator of the physical activity patterns for which our genetically determined biology was originally selected."
(Cordain, L., Gotshall, R.W., Eaton, S.B. Evolutionary aspects of exercise. World Rev Nutr Diet 1997; 81:49-60.)
http://www.thepaleodiet.com/articles.htm#review
If nutritionalists want to learn they look to hunter-gatherers:
The following is from an abstract of a study to examine the nutritional characteristics of a contemporary diet based upon Paleolithic food groups and to determine how these characteristics may impact the risk of chronic disease:
"There is a growing awareness among evolutionary biologists that humans like all species are genetically adapted to the environment of their ancestors - that is, to the environment that their ancestors survived in and the environment that consequently conditioned their genetic makeup. At the same time, there is growing awareness that the pro-found changes in the environment (e.g. in diet and other lifestyle conditions) that began with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry 10, 000 years ago occurred too recently on an evolutionary timescale for the human genome to adjust. As a result of the mismatch between the contemporary human diet and our genetically determined physiology, many of the so-called diseases of civilization have emerged. Previous studies have exam-ined the dietary characteristics of humans living during the Paleolithic, as well as of historically studied hunter-gatherer societiesÉ"
(The Nutritional Characteristics of a Contemporary Diet Based Upon Paleolithic Food Groups, Loren Cordain, PhD Department of Health and Exercise Science, Colorado State University)
And if we want to learn about how we can get out of the mess we're in we can look to hunter-gatherers. That's what primitivism is. No grand programmes, no set plans everybody has to adopt, no books anybody has to read. Just asking people to look at the evidence - the real, living evidence of hunter gatherers - and seeing what we can learn.
You are completely idealising hunter-gatherers - their infant mortality rates for eg show a different picture - do you want your babies to die young?
Taking only infant mortality rates as an indicator of health of a culture is very limiting.
Primitive people let their sick children die at birth. They don't keep babies with fluid instead of brains alive for years on some machine (this particular congenital abnormality occurs in 2 in every thousand births in America). Civilised people decide who lives and dies. Primitive people let Life/Nature decide.
Who's made more of a mess of it? Who's over-populated the earth? Who's destroyed the forest, polluted the water, pumped all the oil? Who's really the ignorant ones here? The ones who've acted like gods, and brought us to the brink of destruction? Or the ones who know they're not gods and live free in their healthy home?
Putting aside the issue of infant mortality and looking at the general health of primitive people, we see strong, healthy people who live long, full lives. They suffer none of the diseases of civilisation (cancer, heart disease, arthritis, etc, ) and when they did get injured they healed quickly, using plants growing freely around them and other healing techniques. These were people on several continents - the only commonality was they were hunter-gatherers who had minimal or no contact with civilisation.
Primitive people live fuller, happier, healthier lives than civilised, tame people. There are some anthropological texts which back this up, including: "Forest People" by Colin Turnbull and "The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins (www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html). Obviously it takes time and effort to ferret out the information as most of it is biased with civilised preconceptions of primitive life. But it does show some startling facts about the poverty and illhealth of civilised living compared to primitive life.
What about the Hazda then? 1 in 7 of the deaths of Hazda women are at childbirth, so without civilisation and its modern medicine many women die in childbirth. Do you think this is ok?
As is common in these arguments, examples of people contaminated with civilisation are used as 'primitive' examples. The Hazda have been herded into virtual concentration camps in some areas. Some of them farm and have done so for years. They've also had their children stolen from them by the missionaries and their culture debased by contact with civilisation in many cases.
A personal friend has spent many years with the Hazda and ALL the elders told him that before contact with civilisation they were happy and healthy. They were extremely upset at the collapse of their culture when the missionaries and other parasites came and say that the life before was incomparably better. Anecdotal? Yes. If you look you will find more examples, but if you don't look you'll never find them as civilisation does not trumpet critiques of itself.
The idea that women can't have children safely without modern medicine is actually very amusing, as surely we would have died out long before now if we couldn't give birth without a machine! Birthing is a complicated, beautiful process which is hindered rather than helped by interference from doctors and machines. It is a deeply sensual experience - highly pleasurable - and while it carries some risks (what doesn't?) is also designed to come about smoothly and efficiently for mother and baby. In a non-interfered birth, there is no tension and with the lack of tension comes an easy delivery.
Ok, well childbirth mightn't be an illness needing hospitals, but what about all the cancer victims and others needing modern medicine?
Our medicine creates more problems than it solves, it treats symptoms rather than root causes, and it is always responding to problems/illnesses that are caused or exasperated by civilised living. Modern medicine is one thing people commonly think is a bonus about living civilised. Another related idea is that primitive people are diseased and 'need' our civilised medicine to make them better (ie. like us). This culturally racist point of view reinforces the cultural superiority complex almost all civilised people have and is provably false.
One of the big excuses missionaries and aid workers give for going to civilise the natives is that of providing 'healthcare'. They invade the primitives with ideas about the body and medicine which are alien to the whole primitive culture. The missionaries and aid workers say they're going to cure and within two generations everyone's dropping like flies from illnesses they've never died of before.
Modern medicine has some basic flaws, symptoms of its civilised worldview. One of these flaws is the idea that the body is a machine (a complex machine, but a machine nonetheless) which has to be 'fixed' by drugs, doctors, and other machines. Whereas all the drugs actually do is stimulate a response in the body. They do not in themselves cure anything. They stimulate the body to heal a bone, fight an infection, etc. What kind of a medical system could be valid when its basic premise is so obviously wrong?
Our medicine cures one thing only to cause another, often more serious, disease. Treating one part of the body to the detriment of the whole body. It's symptomatic of the way we approach the body and nature itself. Something inferior to machines and processed chemicals, to be 'cured' by expert white coats. Rather than recogising that the only cure comes from the person themselves - only the individual body can rejuevenate itself. Bombarding the body with chemicals that cause problems elsewhere is a short term solution that isn't really a solution at all and is perfectly indicative of our short-sighted civilised culture.
Oh, come on, how can you say things have gotton worse? For eg, people were dying of typhoid in London 200 years ago. At least now, most infectious diseases are curable and we have decent sanitation.
Diseases associated with over-crowding, dirty water, dirty food and poor sanitation (parasite-bourne diseases, dysentery, typhoid and paratyphoid fever, worms etc.) are all diseases of civilisation. The 'advances' in sanitation over the past few decades are simply responses to problems caused by civilisation and which were not present in primitive societies.
"When living under near-isolated conditions, apart from civilisation primitive man has complete immunity to dental carries. The body is free from deformity...Reproductive efficiency is such as to permit parturition with no difficulty and little or no pain...Resistence to infectious disease is high, few individuals being sick, and these usually recovering rapidly. The degenerative diseases are rare, even in advance life...Mental complaints are equally rare...The duration of life is long, many living beyond a century...
Of equal significance is the fact that the good health of the primitive has been possible only under conditions of relative isolation. As soon as his contact with civilisation is sufficient to alter his dietary habits, he succumbs to disease very readily and loses all of the unique immunity of the past."
"Primitive Man and His Food" by Arnold de Vries (1952).
You have to try to look at things from a different perspective. Like how come the water got so dirty in the first place? How come things were so unhygienic anyway? Civilised solutions to civilised problems. Try looking outside the loop.
But these uncivilised people you talk of, they don't know our way of life. If they did wouldn't they choose it?
They know about us alright, but they're happy with their own ways, the ways that have worked for millions of years, and they reject our ways. There are many documented examples of native peoples who fought or are still fighting to preserve their way of life and who want nothing to do with modern development or civilisation.
A member of the Hadza, Mahiya, visited Europe some years back. He was repeatedly criticised and attacked by NGO representatives who said it was irresponsible of the Hadza not to send their children to school. "One cannot turn back the wheel of history", they said, "the time of the hunters and gatherers is past."
Mahiya told them that the Hadzabe have lived freely as hunters and gatherers since ancient times, and that they will continue to do so. He said that the Hadzabe were glad and ready to show how life with nature is still possible, without schools, churches, hospitals and the oppression of government.
Mahiya returned gladly to the land of his people, happy to leave a Europe which he found filled with people with pathological ideas, where there is no natural and unencumbered sexual behaviour, where there is no place left to hunt with bow and arrow, where old people are cast out, where there is often less room for children than for dogs, where almost every step is hindered by regulation, and where the purpose of life is to earn money.
Well if that's true, why are there none of these uncivilised people left, how come everyone has embraced civilisation?
There aren't many left, but there are still millions of uncivilised humans in the few wild patches left on earth. But they are under constant pressure to assimilate as their lands are encroached on by loggers, oil companies and miners eager to plunder and loot (on our behalf). Civilisations' agencies force these people to convert under pain of death.
The conversion of uncivilised people has involved missionaries kidnapping their children, forcing them into mission schools, banning the practice of their animist religion, banning their songs and music, chopping down the forest, destroying their source of food and energy, etc. The methods of the brutal conversion of uncivilised peoples are well documented. Even the pope has apologised for the missionaries behavour in Australia re stealing children and imprisoning people in detention centres. The accounts of how civilised people behave towards wild people are available for those who want to know. Can you imagine how you would react in order to survive such a vicious, nasty assault on your home and family? I'm sure you might be reaching for the crucifix and the hoe before long too.
Even after assimiilation has begun, the process is a painful, violent one. Once their culture has been destroyed by missionaries, the void is filled by alcoholism, christianity, apathy and the mass media. We don't know about the primitive people who didn't survive or didn't want to survive in a world like this. Maybe they reckon a life of a slave is not worth living.
Well now that we're at this stage we can't start living like hunter-gatherers again - billions of humans can't hunt and gather, so don't we need farming and civilisation now to support the huge population growth?
Drastic population reductions are going to happen whether we do it voluntarily or not. It would be better, for obvious reasons to do all this gradually and voluntarily, but if we don't the human population is going to be cut anyway. The earth can only support a certain amount of lifeforms. If there is a huge increase in a paticular species, the earth fights back and balances things itself. Life is the most important thing to the earth, not any particular form of life. There are way too many humans to be supported by the earth and if we don't do something about it, the earth will. Already we're seeing it...plagues, famines, seas rising...eventually all this will snowball, unless we start changing.
We are subject to the same laws of biology as any other life form and if we keep filling the world with human babies to the detriment of all other life forms' babies, then someday there won't be a future for anybodies babies.
Laws of nature? What are you talking about? As humans we have also choice and freewill, we are not subject to the laws of nature.
There are laws of nature, even if you don't think they are important. Even if your insulated existence tells you you don't need to worry about silly things like inter-dependence and the web of life, they are there all the same. The laws of nature. Or to paraphrase Tolstoy, "You mighn't be interested in the laws of nature, but the laws of nature are certainly interested in you."
If we use all the oil, mine all the earth, poison the rivers, turn forest into desert and make all of life our "genetic slave and mutant" we WILL feel the consequences. We are what we eat, drink, and breathe. If we destroy everything that we need to live then we are in a very big mess.
This is not a particularly pleasant thought. It doesn't have me jumping up and down with glee to think of the consequences of all our actions on our home, the earth. But we have to face up to the mess we're in and recognise that we are dependent on the web of life, we are part of Nature, and that what we do to the rest of life, we do to ourselves. To realise we are destroying Life - destroying ourselves.
So you want to see mass starvation and social breakdown?
There already is mass starvation and social breakdown. There are millions of humans already starving every day and our society has completely broken down. Instead of trying to fix something that's by its nature oppressive and hierarchical, we should be throwing it out altogether and finding something that does work.
When I say 'work' I mean something that doesn't lead to deforestation, top soil erosion, floods, famines, inequality, hierarchy, poisoned water, food and air, and the complete destruction of our home. I mean something that is 'sustainable' (and organic farming is not sustainable - see farming section below). Hunter-gather lifestyles are sustainable. They had worked for the greater part of human history and it's only recently we started farming and civilisation. They also work for the uncivilised people on earth still, though of course civilisation is doing all it can to wipe them out too so that there is no inspiration, no alternative to civilisation anymore.
Isn't it our human condition though, to manipulate and control?
For people growing up in civilisation, having gone through the brainwashing process (school, college, tv, etc) it seems natural to them for humans to take control of all life on the earth. They are taught to believe in human superiority.
The arrogance and stupidity of this viewpoint is obvious to those cultures who are not obsessed with silly power games and are happy to live their lives without recourse to mind control, nucleur power, etc.
Of course growing up in a place where you are taught to fuck over everyone else will make you think that is a normal, natural way to carry on. But really that's just an insane way to live!
All the religions have several common ideas/dogmas - one of these is that humans have a mandate from god to manage the earth. It's a strange idea when you think about it because why should humans have this task? What makes them better than a flower for instance? A flower has a power and energy different from a humans, but it's only humans who think that makes it a power and energy less than a humans.
So you think murdering a human is the same as killing a flower?
Many people seem to think it does come down to a choice between humans and the rest of nature. Really though we are inseparable from the rest of the web of life and when one part of that web is destroyed, it affects everyone's threads. You can't separate humans from the air they breath, water they drink, food they eat. A poison sprayed on crops in the mountains will flow into the river and on into the drinking water downstream. A nucleur reactor exploding in Russia makes land in Wales unfarmable twenty years later.
Civilised propagandists like to make believe humans are apart from the rest of life on earth, but we can see with our own eyes this isn't possible. The life of a human is inextricably linked to the life of flowers. And a flower has a much right to life as any human, in as much as any lifeform has a 'right' to life. We have as much of a 'right' to life as a mosquito or a mushroom.
I'm not religious, but I still think that surely humans have an consciousness superiour to that of a mosquito?
All civilised people are religious at heart. Now that religious ideas are unfashionable in some groups, they are masked, hidden deeper. Religious ideas are still part of our culture though, and infect a lot of people still.
The idea that humans are superior to other life forms is a common and deeprooted religious idea which plagues most civilised humans. It has led to the current situation where there are six billion human lifeforms and less of wolf, bear and almost every other lifeform. Non-human lifeforms are being wiped out everyday, they suffer mass starvation, destruction of their homes, poisoning from our toxic lifestylesÉthe world is full of misery and pain and wanton destruction. Now that it's reaching boiling point and humans are the next species on the road to extinction you'd think we'd start looking for ways to change. To start living in harmony with nature, our own nature which is uncivilised.
Hey, this sounds like mystical mumbo-jumbo. Primitivism seems to me to be little more than a particularly ugly form of religion.
In fact primitivism eschews all religions as programme-driven, freedom-hating campaigns. Religion is a pecularliarly civilised habit which arose when we became disconnected from immediate experiences of Life and started substituting them with ritual and mumbo jumbo. Religion has always furthered the interests of the state and forced people to give up their individuality to some monolithic power structure.
But in is in humans nature to destroy - look what happened when they arrived in America. When humans arrived, mass extinctions occurred.
Humans have been in America for at least 35, 000 years. The mass extinctions took place 17-15, 000 and 13-11, 000 years ago.
Stone implements as old as 27, 000 years ago have been found in Alaska and human remains and artefacts from 21, 000 and 25, 000 years ago have been found in South America. "A very reasonable conclusion on the peopling of the Americas is that it began at least 35, 000 years ago, but may well have included waves of immigrants at later dates too." (- "Human Evolution" by Roger Lewin).
The mass extinctions that occurred throughout the world were the result of mass flooding, earthquakes, volcanism, tidal waves and other phenomenon caused by the rapid Ice Age meltdown. Excellent accounts of this can be found in Graham Hancocks, "Fingerprints of the Gods".
The arrival of humans didn't coincide with the mass extinctions - the Ice Age meltdown did. Around 17, 000 years ago the Tazewell Advance was at its max. Then it started thawing, abruptly and dramatically, deglaciating millions of miles in less than two thousand years. This rapid deglaciation coincides with the mass extinctions.
The 'humans are inherently destructive' argument just doesn't hold up. It's civilised people that are destructive, not human nature and we can change ourselves/things if we decide we want to.
I agree things have to change, but can't we make improvements to civilisation, not throw it out completely?
There is no way to have civilisation and not have hierarchy, slavery and oppression. Even the old civilisations which were more small-scale than the one we have now were built on hierarchy and slavery. Do you think people would slave all day on projects such as Newgrange or the pyramids if they weren't forced to?
And all the areas where civilisation existed were dominated and exhasted within a short time. Plato warns against chopping down all the trees in Greece as the place is slowly destroyed, the bible records forest where now there is desert, the Great Cedars of Lebanon wiped out, massive irrigation projects by the Romans in Spain lead to it's desertification, North Africa destroyed by the Egyptians, Mexican desert caused by civilisations there, numerous famines in Europe after the forest is destroyed, most of Africa decimated by cash-cropping this centuryÉthe catalogue of destruction goes on and on. It's been going on every time humans abandon sustainable ways of hunting and gathering and turn to agriculture instead.
There is just no way of improving something that's so inherently destructive. It is civilisations nature to destroy and expand. It has no respect for life, so it gobbles it all without a thought. It is ruthlessly irresponsible.
Like an addict, it will do anything to satisfy it's habit.
Nothing short of kicking this slavish habit will do. Our survival depends on it.
Surely if we convert to organic, small-scale agriculture we could avert ecological catastrophe?
As mentioned above, even organic, non-mechanised agriculture is not sustainable. For more details on this phenomenon of soil mining see:
"Topsoil and Civilization"
http://soilandhealth.org/copyform.asp?bookcode=010113
The Amish used no machines or chemicals and yet the topsoil decreased by half in 250 years! Nearly all of Europes forest were destroyed by the Middle Ages - with organic, non-mechanised agriculture. The globe is littered with examples of places where farming was/is practiced. The once-forested, now desertified or scrub areas of China, South and North America, Eygypt, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, India, Africa, Europe and RussiaÉ
A survey measuring 14 years of soil erosion in Columbia, North America discovered the following:
19.7 tons of average annual erosion in corn fields, 10.1 tons in wheat fields and 2.7 tons in rotation (corn, wheat, clover) fields. Although rotating crops slows down the rate of erosion, it doesn't stop it. ("Cropping Systems in relation to Erosion Control" by M F Miller, Misouri Agricultural Experimental Station, 1936.)
The cradle of Chinese civilisation is a good example of non-industrialised, low-level continuous agriculture:
"Soil erosion, then as now, followed soil exhaustion. The early home of Chinese civilisation in the north-west region now resembles a huge battlefield scarred by forces far more detructive than any modern engines of war."
("The Rape of the Earth" by G.V. Jacks and R.O. Whyte, 1939)
Slash and burn or swidden agriculture can be sustainable if there is a low population base and a huge land base.
Slash and burn is swidden agriculture. It doesn't sound quite so destructive, but changing the name to 'swidden' doesn't change it's destructiveness. All agriculture depletes the soil, demineralising it, changing its structure, eventually leading to soil erosion.
"For example, a recent study of the South Fore region of New Guinea by Dr. Arthur Sorenson of the National Institutes of Health shows that the ForŽ have inflicted large-scale irreversible damage upon their primary forest habitat over a 400 square mile area of the Central Range. Thick Kunai grass has taken the place of abandoned garden and hamlet sites, following the movement of settlement deeper into virgin forests. A general breaking up of the forest can be seen in regions where gardening has been carried out for many years."
(- Marvin Harris, "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches", Vintage Books, New York, 1989 (originally published in 1974).
We've managed to keep agriculture going for about 10, 000 years now (a tiny fraction of human history), but the signs are we can't be doing it for much longer. We've almost run out of oil, gas, forests, clean water, minerals in the soil, etc. so it's not going to keep stumbling on for too much longer.
So all I hear is "WE'RE DOOMED!" What kind of a pessimistic view is that?
Our civilisation is doomed. We don't have to be. Humans and civilisation don't neccessarily have to go together - in fact haven't gone together for most of our existence. Primitivists aren't encouraging people to sit back and wait for the apocalypse - they're trying to do something about it.
But we are doing something about the present system. We are in x group, doing x activism, writing x letters, occupying x buildings, etc. The problems are created by an elite few who make the rest of us slave for them and once that system has been overthrown and an x system put in place things will be fine. You don't have to get rid of civilisation in order to make things better.
My turn to ask some questions. How exactly would workers owning the means to their own enslavement change things? How would anarchist-owned factories cheat the laws of nature and 'invent' raw materials, electricity, etc? How exactly would this workerist utopia work out?
Six billion workers driving around, buying washing machines, soil mining the earth like there's no tommorrow.
And hey, there won't be any tommorrow when we get through!
That might have been true of civilisations in the past and in our civilisation up to the present, but we are constantly developing and someday soon won't we develop technology to deal with all the current problems?
Most of the scientific research being carried out now is military reasearch. So you can guess the kind of angle those people will have.
All our technology is harmfull - even the supposedly 'green' technology requires mining, smelting, production factories, etc. Yet, like spoilt brats we insist we have a right to it all. "It's mine! I want it! Mine!"
I've heard this anti-science stuff before. What exactly is primitivisms problem with science?
There is a myth out there that primitivists are anti-science. I can't speak for anyone else, but my personal view on it is that there are huge problems in the way we have approached science and not a problem with science per se. Our way of doing science involves isolating it from every other subject and only using only our reason to apprehend its truths. Although there was a hermetic tradition in Europe where some scientists were versed in all the arts, (including magick, alchemy, poetry and medicine), the trend has been to isolate 'pure' science. Scientists became locked into their labs, narrowly-focused on whatever paticular thing they were working on. Ethics doesn't even register with these people. They can make atom bombs or cloned animals or HAARP projects and still sleep well at night. Science is disconnected from life, from everything else that makes up our existence.
Our science is based on the priority of the reason and no other forms of knowledge or intuition are deemed 'scientific'. Other ways of knowing are labelled 'hysterical', 'irrational' and 'superstitious'. Reason is that part of us that doesn't actually work too well - we're not very reasonable creatures, we're mainly emotional, intuitive beings. By using only reason to apprehend truths we are narrowing ourselves unneccesarily. We are trying to confine the universe instead of opening out into it. Feeling it.
Our science is a product of our fucked up, power-hungry, world view. In "Blackfoot Physics", F. David Peat, a white American scientist of many years goes to study with Native Americans. He realises that their science is far more complex than any western science, comparable only to whats going on now in advanced quantom physics. He finds that the western science is narrow and control orientated, whereas the native one is inseparable from stories, song, ethics, nature, lifestyle, etc. So they use it to help them live their lives in harmony and balance, not to try to nuke the Arabs or build computers.
With a world-view like ours, everything our science produces will be dangerous. To expect technological solutions to our current problems is like taking the axe off an axe-wielding maniac only to show him how to use a gun! Our problems are caused by our science, by our world-view, therefore we have to change that before things will get better.
We have already developed bio computers and solar energy - these technologies can be used to continue civilisation. Already, in Japan they're making computers out of yogurt cultures.
That's like saying you can make computers out of sand just because silicon is one of the most abundent chemicals on the planet! The whole processing technique is what makes it dependent on civilisation.
There are millions of theories of how to build a transistor out of just about anything. And a thousend experiments where they have managed to make one of these transistors to 'work'. For a transistor to be of any use it has to be stable and realiable as well as physically small and have economical power consumption. Further, for a transistor to be of any use in integrated circuits such as microprosessors they have to be microscopicaly small and have to be able to be produced with some sort of mesh- or growth-process in order for their production to be fast and cheap. Therefore active chemical and/or biological processes are the last thing that comes to mind if one starts to think about alternatives to silicon-technology. Bio/chemical processes used as electric switches are inherently chaotic, unstable, unpredictable, uncontrollable, noisy, subject to interference from light, heat, vibration, contamination, and various sorts of eletromagnetic radiation.
These Japanese 'milk' related bacterial 'transistors' were probably sustained for a few seconds in a billion dollar lab taking half the space of the building and kilowats of energy for all the instruments involved. And the fact that the bacteria has to be constantly fed with specific substances to keep it alive makes the whole thing completely unfeasable in the firstplace - and anyway the bacteria would change slightly with even the tiniest variation of environmental conditions and time, denying any consistancy with such a set up. The Wired-fantacist proponents of technology never speculate how feasable such ideas are or how they might be applied in practice. They just believe any new theory they hear about as a 'saviour' to their techno world.
The dairy computers are just one example - hydrogen fuel cells are another or the claim that one giant solar panel could power the earth. The thing with alternative energy and alternative products is that they all depend on civilisations existence. What's really wrong with all these clutchings at straws is the attitude of saving civilisation no matter what. The global systems of high technology have brought us misery, enslavement and poisons - why do we want to keep it all going knowing all this?
Civilisation doesn't have to be a global system of high technology - we can have small-scale, sustainable communities instead.
And how will these communities make all the things they want. All the civilised things they desire. Not just computers - but how about things like a spoon or a shovel? Think of the metals, alloys and compounds - the mining, refining, processing or these materials and energy required for them - and all the related technologies with materials and energy inputs for them. The chemicals, plastics, copperwire, insulation, precision semiconductors, capasitors, precision crystals, all the testing and measuring equipment and the calibration equipment for that, etc.
We could use old recycled stuff?
Recycled stuff requires gathering, transporting, sorting, reprocessing, reworking, repair etc. which all again require the whole of industrial system intact.
But plastic, for instance, can now be naturally created using conventional dairy. So we can have technology which isn't so harmful.
Biologically derived polymers (bio-plastics) are the worst example of alternative 'green' products! They are NOT direct replacement for normal plastics in 99.99% of the applications. This is because there are about million different types of plastic and this is because every one of them has a special purpose and cannot be replaced by another type just like that. Yet another example of the hype not living up to expectations. Of course by the time all this is pointed out to someone they've read some other 'wonder' theory about making airplanes out of poo or something. This faith in technology is really astounding. And it is this faith that needs to be questioned.
But we have a RIGHT to technology. We have a right to a certain standard of living.
Someone once said that "my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." As technology and farming are unsustainable and inherently destructive, they don't have a RIGHT to exist.
The idea of 'rights' is one of a child looking for help from a parent, a serf looking to his king, a slave to his master. If we are free we don't have to ask for 'rights' from anyone - least of all a corporate state who's only interested in making money and expanding its power.
At the moment our 'right' to hot showers and playstations is dependent on the exploitation and destruction of the earth. Our baubles are wet with the blood of countless natives who used to live where the mines and oil fields are now. What 'right' do we have to destroy the earth because we can't live in harmony with ourselves and nature?
Well it's all very well to live in harmony with nature, but these natives don't have Shakespeare, do they?
Translates roughly as as "those ignorant savages don't have the art/brains/consciousness that civilised folk have." This view is based on a complete lack of understanding about uncivilised people's lives.
To wild people, art is not something to be consumed. It's not entertainment. It's a way of making sense of the world, of passing on important messages. It's being able to see beauty in an intricately designed flower. Or hear music in the waves crashing against the rocks. Or in a flock of white geese flying overhead, calling to each other as they disappear into the distance. Who needs art when you can experience beauty in so many, various, startling places? A painting stuck on a wall hangs lifeless. A recorded track intones the same music again and again. Predictable experiences that don't change, don't mutate, don't startle in any way.
Shakespeare is dead after all this. His world is a sterile, one-dimensional, intellectual one. It's going to a staid dinner party after being at a wild feast. It's using a vibrator after making love with my man. It's eating a frozen, microwave dinner after gorging on fresh blackberries.
The way we compartmentalise ART is another symptom of civilisation, another result of our world-view.
If you start thinking about it and looking round, you'll see lots of these sacred cows are actually rotten carrion. I've tried here to describe some of them, but it really is up to you to go start figuring it out yourself. It hurts to look at the mess, the rotting flesh. But freedom is impossible without knowledge, without really looking.
Question everything. Everything you've been told about civilisation. And you'll see you've been told a big, pampered, blood-dripping lie. But don't take my word for it - go and find out for yourself.
Primitivism is a childish view of a childish life, lacking the adult perspective, how can you expect us to take it seriously?
The paternalistic civilised adult who is superior to the primitive child.
Very common idea with the Victorians who used their adult responsibility towards their ignorant childish wards as an excuse to plunder, exploit and enslave. Such culturally racist attitudes haven't changed much.
The missionaries spoke of their duty to 'teach' the childlike primitives adult responsibilities like work, time and religion. Anything the primitive people had been doing up til now was judged 'childish' because the missionaries were coming from a completely different worldview which doesn't value things like having no work ethic, 'living in the here and now' and believing that 'all that exists lives'. Different worldviews are fine, except the missionaries and civilised agents everywhere never leave other worldviews alone. They convert and destroy, plunder and pillage. All for the best of their child charges of course!
I didn't mean it like that! My point is that primitivism doesn't give us any programmes of action - it's lacking in solutions."
Primitivism doesn't give a programme of salvation. It is not a religion. It is not even a programme.
"We don't need any more programmes, we need new visions."
Daniel Quinn, "The Story of B."
Don't expect to find a detailed 'how to win the revolution' in a primitivist book. It's not like that.
We all have to come up with our own visions, our ways out of this mess. This doesn't rule out collective organisation - on the contrary - we need to be making friendships and alliances, to be thinking about this together. But primitivism is not going to give you easy answers, or maybe even any answers at all for a long time.
And maybe things like this FAQ are a waste of time because people are looking for 'programmes' and 'days of action' and organised activities. They want to be told what to do and what to think.
The horror of the situation we're in is pretty overwhelming and the easiest thing is to deny it, to pretend it's not really that bad. The collective amnesia is a device to stop our culture facing up to the horror of the trauma it's inflicting on itself and all Life.
More than FAQ's and articles and books, we need walks and silence and days on our own and weeks listening to non-human voices. We need these things more than the rational arguments because it's only when we connect with these feelings that we learn to love ourselves/the earth again. And it is from this love that change will come.
This is the other meaning of primitivism. Our primal feelings, our wildness, without which we are just empty shells. When we can heal ourselves and re-wild ourselves we will see the change. We will have become the change.