http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html

an interesting essay which criticizes both the standard mythology of civilization and the primitivist counter-myth. neither of these stories contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: an alchemical coincidencia oppositorum of both seems called for, given the current situation.

Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this: "A long time ago, our ancestors were 'primitive.' They lived in caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented 'civilization,' in which we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter, inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. It's getting better all the time and will continue forever."

We examine the dominant story and find that although it contains some truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values and behaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create a perfect mirror image:

"A long time ago, our ancestors were 'primitive.' They were just as smart as we would be if we didn't watch television, and they lived in cozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, and had long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kept their populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase. Then someone invented 'civilization,' in which we monopolized the land and grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories but low in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered land from neighboring foragers and enslaved them to build sterile monuments while the elite developed an empty death culture, and invented technologies of repression and disconnection and gluttonous consumption, and everywhere life was replaced with control. It's been getting worse and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the way we did before."

There is a third option, but it requires abandoning the whole civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, "We can regrow the spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700's, not as a temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolizing society and the rise of another, but as a permanent condition -- and we will protect this condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by inventing new ways. We can do this because human nature continues to evolve. Just as the old model of civilization became available to us as we changed, we are changing again and new doors are opening."

Well, they're only open a crack. To grow biological abundance for its own sake, and not for human utility, is still a fringe position. But my point is that the civilized-primitive framework forces us to divide things a certain way: On one side are complexity, change, invention, unstable "growth", taking, control, and the future. On the other side are simplicity, stasis, tradition, stability, giving, freedom, and the past. Once we abandon that framework, which is itself an artifact of western industrial society, we can integrate evidence that the framework excludes, and we can try to match things up differently.

http://c-realm.org/

so ankh_f_n_khonsu turned me on to this podcast a while back, and i've been listening to it heavily for the past week. it covers quite a lot of topics near to my heart: economic and ecological collapse, ayahuasca, shamanism, genetics, civilization, singularity, spirituality, high technology, peak oil, etc. and has featured interviews with some pretty high-profile thinkers in these areas including James Kunstler, Daniel Quinn, Doug Rushkoff, and Jeremy Narby among numerous others. recently the podcast's host, kmo, has been spreading the word about the Fourth International Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos, Peru (an event which i am strongly drawn towards attending: i'm relatively close in a physical sense and extremely interested, but it unfortunately doesn't make much financial sense for me at the moment), as well as the non-profit Amazonian curanderismo center, Temple of the Way of Light (another institution i'm highly tempted to check out). he's also got an exclusive (and particularly awesome) talk by Terrence McKenna entitled Vertigo at History's Edge. to sum up, this podcast is definitely worth checking out.

http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/02/hierarchy-must-grow-and-is-therefore.html

from J Vail's latest

This civilizational selection for growth manifests in many ways, but most recently it resulted in the rise of the modern financial system. As political entities became more conscious of this growth imperative, and their competition with other entities, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. The earliest, and least intentional example is that of economic specialization and centralization. Since before the articulation of these principles by Adam Smith, it was understood that specialization was more efficient—when measured in terms of growth—than artesian craftsmanship, and that centralized production that leveraged economy of place better facilitated growth than did distributed production. It was not enough merely to specialize “a little,” because the yardstick was not growth per se, but growth in comparison to the growth of competitors. It was necessary to specialize and centralize ever more than competing polities in order to survive. As with previous systems of growth, the agricultural and industrial revolutions were self-reinforcing as nations competed in terms of the size of the infantry armies they could field, the amount of steel for battleships and cannon they could produce, etc. It wasn’t possible to reverse course—while it may have been possible for the land area of England, for example, to support its population via either centralized or decentralized agriculture, only centralized agriculture freed a large enough portion of the population to manufacture export goods, military materiel, and to serve in the armed forces.

Similarly, the expansion of credit accelerated the rate of growth—it was no longer necessary to save first buy later when first home loans, then car loans, then consumer credit cards became ever more prevalent, all accelerating at ever-faster rates thanks to the wizardry of complex credit derivatives. This was again a self-supporting cycle: while it is theoretically possible to revert from a buy-now-pay-later system to a save-then-buy system, the transition period would require a significant period of vastly reduced spending—something that would crush today’s highly leveraged economies. Not only is it necessary to maintain our current credit structure, but it is necessary to continually expand our ability to consume now and pay later—just as in the peer polity conflicts between stone-age tribes, credit providers race to provide more consumption for less buck in an effort to compete for market share and to create shareholder return. Corporate entities, while existing at least as early as Renaissance Venice, are yet another example of structural bias toward growth: corporate finance is based on attracting investment by promising greater return for shareholder risk than competing corporations, resulting in a structural drive toward the singular goal of growth. And modern systems of quarterly reporting and 24-hour news cycles only exacerbate the already short-term risk horizons of such enterprises.

We live on a finite planet, and it seems likely that we are nearing the limits of the Earth’s ability to support ongoing growth. Even if this limit is still decades or centuries away, there is serious moral hazard in the continuation of growth on a finite planet as it serves merely to push that problem on to our children or grandchildren. Growth cannot continue infinitely on a finite planet. This must seem obvious to many people, but I emphasize the point because we tend to overlook or ignore its significance: the basis of our civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. Our civilization seems to have a knack for pushing the envelope, for finding stop-gap measures to push growth beyond a sustainable level. This is also problematic because the further we are able to inflate this bubble beyond a level that is sustainable indefinitely, the farther we must ultimately fall to return to a sustainable world. This is Civilization’s sunk cost: there is serious doubt that our planet can sustain 6+ billion people over the long term, but by drawing a line in the sand, that “a solution that results in the death of millions or billions to return to a sustainable level” is fundamentally impermissible, we merely increase the number that must ultimately die off. Furthermore, while it is theoretically possible to reduce population, as well as other measures of impact on our planet, in a gradual and non-dramatic way (e.g. no die off), the window of opportunity to choose that route is closing. We don’t know how fast—but that uncertainty makes this a far more difficult risk management problem (and challenge to political will) than knowing that we have precisely 10, 100, or 1000 years.

I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as 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), with cities being defined—-so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—-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. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside. [+]

so yesterday Jeff and i had a pretty good conversation about civilization, sustainability, and culture. in the rant from the other day i had gone off about what a city is, why it's at the root of the problems of civilization. that might be slightly inaccurate. a city might be more accurately described as the type of habitation encouraged by a Dominator culture. what does this mean?

well, to explain this you have to recapitulate the story of how humanity has developed thus far told by Daniel Quinn, Derek Jensen, Jason Godesky, and numerous others. but it seems like a pretty important story to get across, so i'll try to formulate it another way. the story goes like this:

people are animals, in most respects just like other animals. organisms (including animals), over millions of years of evolution, develop survival strategies. the organisms with strategies that work in the long term are also organisms which work with other organisms: the gazelle eats the grass, the lion eats the gazelle. the lion helps the gazelle's fitness by eating the weak, old, and deformed; the gazelle helps the lion's fitness by providing food. and so on for every species: we've all been taught about ecology and the interdependent web of life.

the people who survived through millions of years of prehistory developed cultures well-fit for survival. their numbers grew large enough to fit into their ecologies, and remained at a more or less steady state after that. this is common of species who have found their particular niche. these cultures exhibited certain behaviours that ensured long-term survival such as not hunting competitors to extinction, not denying all food to competitors. most importantly, they have "found their place" ecologically so that their zero-population-growth communities can eat what is around without destroying it all.

there have been many names for these people: primitive, native, leavers. the term we empolyed was Optimizers. that's because these cultures lived in an optimal balance with all of the other parts of nature around them, as described above. optimizers have different strategies for existing, but they have near-zero population growth, and they allow other species to flourish all around them. some have intimate relationships with their prey, almost all revere the living world around them. note that not all of these cultures know what or why they're doing this: it's just how things are done among Optimizers.

the Optimizers were quite happy to go on doing their optimizing thing for millions of years. but somewhere along the way, one group of Optimizers had a bit of a culturual mutation or new idea. perhaps it happened over generations. but they stopped being Optimizers. it all has to do with agriculture.

first off you have to distinguish between horticulture and agriculture. the technology of knowing that plants will sprout when you've put seeds there the season before is not bad in itself, and was indeed used by many Optimizer cultures. the problem comes when that particular quirky bunch decided to clear away their ecosystem and convert it into a farm. two things happen here: firstly, the increased food supply allows population to shoot up, and secondly, over time, the soil starts to get bad. where once there was a well-evolved native ecosystem keeping things running, now there is just a barren field with 1 or 2 species of cereal grains.

these two facts mean that this particular culture is overpopulated, and their lands are subject to diminishing returns. thus they are highly motivated to conquer or kill the Optimizers next door, clear their land, and put into place the new system. we call these people Dominators because their method of operation is to glut an ecosystem, take in all the biomass, convert it to more humans, and use superior numbers to keep the Dominator culture going.

so it happens that Dominator culture develops massive populations, conquest, slavery, destruction of ecosystems, socio-economic heirarchy, and so forth. give the Dominators 9,500 years to conquer Europe and Asia. give them 500 more to conquer the rest of the world, and you are left with the present: global Dominator culture, with next to no Optimizers left. the common term for this is "civilization".

the idea as to how to carry forward involves learing how to be enough of an Optimizer culture to be self-sustainable in the long term, but also to be able to resist Dominator cultures. now, the climate crisis is going to be bad for just about everyone; the peak oil crisis is going to be felt extremely hard among the global mechanized Dominator culture. so changing cultures before the crash could be like a lifeboat for those who are willing to step outside the Dominator box and use some Optimizer wisdom.

i kind of see Jeff Vail's rhizome model as an ideal for what i'm envisioning here. a collection of autonomous Optimizer cultures who are able to come together for common defense against Dominator threats.

so there you have it. a rehash of your standard Primitivist thinking to be sure; but maybe this formulation will be more clear to some. Dominator culture's brainwashing matrix mytholgy has such a strong hold on us that it's easy to forget. but it seems to me like the Big Meltdown could very likely happen in our lifetimes, and knowing the why and the how might make it easier for those of us who are hell bent on being some of the 1% to survive the Big Oops to do so.

is that civilization can be defined as a society of people living in cities. what's a city? it is a community of humans who exceed the carrying capacity of their local region. which means no other life-forms are allowed to exist there that compete with human land use. THAT entails obtaining resources from elsewhere. THAT is why civilization entails exponential population growth. THAT is why civilization breeds Empires. THAT is why our entire way of life and urbanised world-system of billions (and those of us in the "first world" who consume enough for many more billions) is about to crash into the goddamn mountain. civilization is predicated on constant expansion, domination, warfare, intensification of consumption. THAT is why more species die every day. why the land, the air, water, the life is all fucking dying and ITS GOING TO KEEP HAPPENING no matter what we do as long as civilization continues. civilization = unsustainable settlement patterns. civilization = living out of balance. if we don't correct the balance really stinking soon, it will get corrected for us. and that could be a process of enormous agony, destruction and death. except for whatever eats humans. it'll be a feeding frenzy for those little bugs and scavengers.