Table of Contents
Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the [Roman] Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory.
Joseph Tainter
To combat cultural genocide one needs a critique of civilization itself.
Gary Snyder
VISUALIZE INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE
Earth First!
FOREWORD
The thing I admire about Chicano village life in New Mexico is that beneath the sleek overlay of trucks and telephones lies the still-vital infrastructure of an ancient and, until recently, undisturbed way of life. Men hunt elk and turkey. Women know plants. Curandera-healers with their potent prophetic powers live among us. Everyone knows how to build a mud house, dig the irrigation ditch, grow corn, ride a horse, and navigate through the forest on a moon-lit night. And despite the raging poverty that universally flattens land-based communities when they are conquered, colonized, and consumed, there is more happiness here than in any place I have known. Its a simple happiness, nothing fancy, a here-and-now contentment: a story told at the gas pump, an invitation to go fishing, a twist of language that illuminates the irony of history. Living here, I have learned not to contemplate a trip to the dump or the village store without carrying with me an extra twenty minutes, or an hour, to give and receive.
Such experiences reinforce what, after decades of research and dozens of social-change movements, I have long suspected. That it is not just contemporary industrial society that is dysfunctional; it is civilization itself. That we humans are born to be creatures of the land and the sea and the stars; that we are relations to the animals, cohorts to the plants. And that our well-being, and the well-being of the very planet, depend on our pursuance of our given place within the natural world.
It is against these musings that I celebrate the coming of John Zerzans accomplishment of an anthology harboring the best of civilized peoples critiques of civilization. Herein the reader will discover the questions that need to be asked and the insights that beg to be nurtured if humankind and the natural world as we know it are to thrive into the future.
This book is that important.
Chellis Glendinning
Chimay, New Mexico
26 July 1998
INTRODUCTION
JOHN ZERZAN
Since the first edition of Against Civilization [1999] the general perspective referred to by its title has begun to make sense to a growing number of people. An overall crisispersonal, social, environmentalis rapidly deepening, making such an indictment feasible, if not unavoidable.
This collection is, among other things, a reminder that critiques of civilization itself are anything but new. And the past five years have provided an opportunity to add voices to the chorus of doubters, those with enough vision to think outside civilizational confines.
The 15 additional selections include correctives to a serious deficiency of the original book: the paucity of women and indigenous contributors [not exclusive categories, of course].
The current edition makes some advance in these vital areas, I believe.
Discontent with civilization has been with us all along, but is coming on now with a new freshness and insistence, as if it were a new thing. To assail civilization itself would be scandalous, but for the conclusion, occurring to more and more people, that it may be civilization that is the fundamental scandal.
I wont dwell here on the fact of the accelerating destruction of the biosphere. And perhaps equally obvious is the mutilation of human nature, along with outer nature. Freud decided that the fullness of civilization would bring, concomitantly, the zenith of universal neurosis. In this he was evidently a bit sanguine, too mild in his prognosis.
It is impossible to scan a newspaper and miss the malignancy of daily life. See the multiple homicides, the 600-percent increase in teen suicide over the past 30 years; count the ways to be heavily drugged against reality; ponder what is behind the movement away from literacy. One could go on almost endlessly charting the boredom, depression, immiseration.
The concept of progress has been in trouble for a few decades, but the general crisis is deepening now at a quickening pace. From this palpable extremity it is clear that something is profoundly wrong. How far back did this virus originate? How much must change for us to turn away from the cultural death march we are on?
At the same time, there are some who cling to the ideal of civilization, as to a promise yet to be fulfilled. Norbert Elias, for example, declared that civilization is never finished and always endangered. More persuasive is the sobering view of what civilization has already wrought, as in todays deadening and deadly convergence of technological processes and mass society. Richard Rubenstein found that the Holocaust bears witness to the advance of civilization, a chilling point further developed by Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman argued that historys most gruesome moment so far was made possible by the inner logic of civilization, which is, at bottom, division of labor. This division of labor, or specialization, works to dissolve moral accountability as it contributes to technical achievement in this caseto the efficient, industrialized murder of millions.
But isnt this too grim a picture to account for all of it? What of other aspects, like art, music, literatureare they not also the fruit of civilization? To return to Bauman and his point about Nazi genocide, Germany was after all the land of Goethe and Beethoven, arguably the most cultural or spiritual European country. Of course we try to draw strength from beautiful achievements, which often offer cultural criticism as well as aesthetic uplift. Does the presence of these pleasures and consolations make an indictment of the whole less unavoidable?
Speaking of unfulfilled ideals, however, it is valid to point out that civilization is indeed never finished and always endangered. And that is because civilization has always been imposed, and necessitates continual conquest and repression. Marx and Freud, among others, agreed on the incompatibility of humans and nature, which is to say, the necessity of triumph over nature, or work.
Obviously related is Kenneth Bouldings judgment that the achievements of civilization have been paid for at a very high cost in human degradation, suffering, inequality, and dominance.
There hasnt been unanimity as to civilizations most salient characteristic. For Morgan it was writing; for Engels, state power; for Childe, the rise of cities. Renfrew nominated insulation from nature as most fundamental. But domestication stands behind all these manifestations, and not just the taming of animals and plants, but also the taming of human instincts and freedoms. Mastery, in various forms, has defined civilization and gauged human achievement. To name, to number, to time, to representsymbolic culture is that array of masteries upon which all subsequent hierarchies and confinements rest.
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