Notice: Now that it has been repeatedly brought to my attention, I have enabled anonymous commenting on my blog, so those of you sans blog can leave your own comments.
Before addressing the long-winded title of my post, a quick recap of my last week in Boston.
So far, I have attacked packing in leaps and bounds, but half-heartedly. I've really enjoyed my summer here, and I am not looking forward to leaving.
I had dinner with Amy, Samantha, Frankie, and Elizabeth in Nahant (which, as you'd probably be interested to know, Nathanael, is a rare example of a populated island connected by a tambolo.) 'Twas great. Ate too much. Made "Your Mom" jokes. Said some good byes, plus got an awesome early birthday present of a water balloon slingshot from Amy.
Work is about as slow as molasses, and lazier, to boot. I wore my Jack Daniels shirt to work today, and nobody blinked twice. Where else in my life am I going to get a job that pays this well and requires so little? Unless, of course, I join a union...Tomorrow is my last day.
Nathanael asked me to critique a series of essays (The 30 Theses by Jason Godesky) by a primitivist who claims that the civilization as we know it is facing imminent collapse. Although the sort of doomsday scenario the essayist foresees is slew of very modern problems, the thinking that inspired him is very old. Rousseau is certainly smiling in his grave that his adherents have adopted so well to the Information Age. Never minding the obvious silliness of a software engineer heralding a return to nature, he is not as smart as the old philosopher, but certainly better informed. A bit like arming a baby with a Kalashnikov. The technology exists, but the capacities are lacking. I don't think good old Jean-Jacques would have been floored with Godesky's Disneyesque invocation of the "scientific" moral virtue of diversity, per biology and physics in his first thesis. Reading it felt like I was reading the "Circle of Life" scene in "The Lion King" rewritten for grownups. Heavy on the factual theatrics, light on substance. Also, claiming the virtue of "diversity" as your cornerstone while gearing yourself up to rewrite the entire human order is about as vapid as it gets, as it is worth point out that diversity is about as relative and an artificial structure as it gets. "Diversity" is entirely dependent on how advanced our notions are of the multitudinous options that exist, in the natural world or otherwise. If we aren't educated enough to realize that there are 1,000 of different types of ivies, trees, fauna, or what have you, then we can't appreciate the "moral of diversity." If diversity is the only moral, and humans in Jason Godesky's world are living in societies without the resources to teach an appreciation of diversity, then by his own logic, they are ignorant of morality. So what then is the point? Diversity is too unstable a foundation on which to properly attack modern society, precisely because the concept of diversity is so thoroughly a modern concept and a creature of our age, and no matter how many times you invoke the Big Bang, it just doesn't cut it.
The second thing that deeply annoys me about primitivists (and their more intelligent cousins, the anarchists) is a total lack of appreciation of the consequences of their dreams. I read a really good example of this phenomenon, of ideologues versus reality, in Newsweek Magazine, usually a source of the most shallow news coverage available. A man making a documentary found a group of pro-lifers protesting outside of an abortion clinic, and asked them a very simple question:
"Ok, if abortion were made illegal, what should be the punishment for a woman who gets one anyway? These women would then be legally committing murder."
The responses are hilarious. Most of them looked stunned.
"I don't know"
"Not my place to say"
"Pray for them"
One person tried to suggest punishing the physician who performed it. When the man asked about cases of women performing them at home, without assistance, the person just looked helpless and shrugged.
The lesson is that its one thing to protest something you believe is immoral. Its something entirely different to actually enshrine your beliefs into law. Do these pro-lifers have the guts to actually throw real women into prison? Can they seriously believe abortion will just disappear if you make it illegal? The documentary suggests otherwise.
(For the sake of curiosity, I performed this experiment on Nelsen. I asked him the same question, and he responded with "Its not my place to judge." Bullseye.)
Anarchists and primitivists are in a similar boat. Its a beautiful thing to say that civilization corrupts. Its even more beautiful to make pretty speeches and post manifestos on the internet. But actually condemning the entire human population to living on subsistence scavenging? You believe that children, the sick, and the mentally handicapped would be better off in the wild? Are you actually willing to close down the day care centers, the institutions, and the hospitals and personally wheel those people out into the fields and say, "Best of luck to you buddy. Just remember, if you don't make it, its because evolution is a beautiful thing and you just happened to wind up on the wrong side of the genetic lottery." If you can do these things personally, then you'll have my ear, and also my hand on my cell phone, ready to call 911 for when you get violent.
Of course, for the weaker of stomach like Mr. Godesky, who secretly hope that some deus ex machina (or in his formulation, hominis ex machina), will do it for you. No need for revolutionaries to storm Shriners. If civilization collapses, it'll be done for them without the need to sully their hands (and souls) with actually taking real action to make their dreams come true. It's escapist at best, but still cowardly in spirit. So I find myself staring at 30 theses, over half of which go to great pains to show how we're going to wake up any day now and find that its all gone. Poof. Vanished. And people like him are ready to make it in the wild. Beneath it all, you grasp that he hopes in his heart of hearts that it could happen today. Now. Right now. He's ready, just you wait. He saw it coming all along. Never mind that if he believed this deeply in his dream, he'd quit his job and go about trying to do everything he could to tear it all down. Best not to muddle one's conscience and convince yourself that society will do it for you.
Lastly, lets say he's right and I'm wrong. Do they seriously believe that a civilization can never rise again? Somewhere along the way, we did it once. One tribe went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. So if we return to being hunter-gatherers, what's to stop one tribe from deciding all over again to start farming.? Short of nuclear winter, we'll never be able to completely eradicate all arable land to the point where nothing can grow. It may no longer be optimal in a lot of places, but absolutely barren? Dream on. Go back to ag school. Surely that evolution you revere so much is efficient enough to create a plant that can thrive even in denuded soils. Or is evolution only useful to invoke when you want to try and enchant your audience (and yourself)? For if there's one thing that Jason wants to make sure we understand, its that life marches on, thanks to good old natural selection. And life abhors a vacuum. Someone will eventually discover all over again that the fastest way to gain power in a world where all previous forms of temporal power have been conveniently erased is through a civilization. Uh oh. Sorry Jason, it looks like we're just going to start all over again.
(In case you want to argue that it'll be impossible for some reason blah blah, etc. etc., lack of resources, blah blah, don't forget the Infinite Monkey Theorem. With absolute certainty (i.e., probability equal to 1), we know that if you give a monkey who can live forever a keyboard that'll work forever, it will type the complete works of Shakespeare in chronological order not only once, but infinitely many times. That's how infinity works. A probability, no matter how small, as long as it is not zero, can happen with absolute certainty if the lifespan approaches infinity for all intents and purposes. This is mathematical fact, and I'll be glad to give anyone who asks the proof.)
Man, I haven't really talked philosophy in a long, long time. I realize I've lost most of my readers already, but its sometimes good to exercise other parts of my brain.
Of course, arguing with fools is making a fool of yourself. So I guess the last laugh is on me.
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6 comments:
I was going to write a well-argued response referring to his theses, but I guess he doesn't have any bandwidth after dusk or something. You were able to get to them today, but now at night I get a 509. What's up with that. For now I note that he has stated the goal of his site is to warn as many people as he can and see if he can't get survivalist skills into more heads than they're in right now. There was a thing he wrote called "The Ethics of Collapse", maybe a little shorter than a thesis, detailing his morals vis-à-vis the collapse. I'll write more sometime when I can get to the theses. I still want to read the one called "Civilization Will Not Be Able to Re-Emerge" or however he phrased it to see how he counters the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
Hi...this is Nathanael's mom...
I think the operative word in human "civilization" is convenience. Whether hunting/gathering or cultivating plants, people and societies will usually take the path of least resistence to get what they need. Wastes less precious energy.
Eating so many grains and sugars is likely not the best diet for a human. Humans probably at one time ate fruits, vegetables, and raw fish.
Hello Nathanael's Mom.
I don't disagree, but my argument was a bit long-winded (i.e., I liked ranting to myself for a half-hour), so I'm not sure where that fits in. If you could point out where it fits in with the thread of the conversation, I would really appreciate it. (And could respond appropriately)
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my Thirty Theses, Chuck. As you can tell, we had some technical difficulties around the time you wrote this, but the site should be fully operational now.
Unfortunately, your critique follows the same pattern I've usually found in responses to my Thirty Theses: you've mostly addressed straw men, rather than the arguments I've actually made.
Although the sort of doomsday scenario the essayist foresees is slew of very modern problems, the thinking that inspired him is very old. Rousseau is certainly smiling in his grave that his adherents have adopted so well to the Information Age.
I should point out that I nonetheless have some very big problems with Rousseau. How someone came from utterly wrong premises to a generally correct conclusion is a wonder of random probability. While I generally agree with Rousseau's conclusions, his reasoning could hardly be more off.
...Disneyesque invocation of the "scientific" moral virtue of diversity, per biology and physics in his first thesis.
I don't think there's anything "Disneyesque" about it. Diverse ecosystems flourish; homogeneous ecosystems die. All the fundamental trends in the basic physical sciences--ecological succession, entropy, chemical bonding--all push the universe towards a state of greater diversity. It's the one major common thread throughout the physical sciences.
Also, claiming the virtue of "diversity" as your cornerstone while gearing yourself up to rewrite the entire human order is about as vapid as it gets, as it is worth point out that diversity is about as relative and an artificial structure as it gets.
That's simply not true. There's nothing vapid, artificial or arbitrary. My suggestion is something like utilitarianism, but replacing utility (which is vapid, artificial and arbitrary), with diversity, which we can measure and define. We can say conclusively that X is more diverse than Y. There's no ambiguity there. It's no more ambiguous than volume or weight.
"Diversity" is entirely dependent on how advanced our notions are of the multitudinous options that exist, in the natural world or otherwise.
No, it depends on just counting up the parts. Hasn't a thing to do with any notions, advanced or otherwise. Just counting.
If we aren't educated enough to realize that there are 1,000 of different types of ivies, trees, fauna, or what have you, then we can't appreciate the "moral of diversity."
That you haven't gone out to count yet doesn't change the fact that you quite easily could. We don't need to go back and forth endlessly about our opinions of right and wrong; we can go out, count how diverse the system is, take the projections, and see if the number's positive or negative.
If diversity is the only moral, and humans in Jason Godesky's world are living in societies without the resources to teach an appreciation of diversity, then by his own logic, they are ignorant of morality. So what then is the point? Diversity is too unstable a foundation on which to properly attack modern society, precisely because the concept of diversity is so thoroughly a modern concept and a creature of our age, and no matter how many times you invoke the Big Bang, it just doesn't cut it.
That just doesn't make sense. So we only began to understand diversity in the past century or so, so does that mean that ecological succession only began in the 1900s? No, it happened all along, it just took us until then to recognize it. That hardly makes it "unstable." Who cares if it's been recognized for a long time? Is general relatively also "too unstable a foundation on which to properly" explore modern physics? It's even younger than diversity. The age of an idea has utterly no relationship with its veracity.
Anarchists and primitivists are in a similar boat. Its a beautiful thing to say that civilization corrupts. Its even more beautiful to make pretty speeches and post manifestos on the internet. But actually condemning the entire human population to living on subsistence scavenging? You believe that children, the sick, and the mentally handicapped would be better off in the wild? Are you actually willing to close down the day care centers, the institutions, and the hospitals and personally wheel those people out into the fields and say, "Best of luck to you buddy. Just remember, if you don't make it, its because evolution is a beautiful thing and you just happened to wind up on the wrong side of the genetic lottery." If you can do these things personally, then you'll have my ear, and also my hand on my cell phone, ready to call 911 for when you get violent.
A fine straw man, but something I already answered in the Theses. Not that I haven't heard this straw man many times before, but it remains a straw man, even so. Because you're not talking about actual primitive society, you're talking about a caricature of primitive society. The Shanidar 1 skeleton proves the antiquity of compassion. Human tribes have looked out for each other since time immemorial. It's only in civilization where you find the sick and the elderly offloaded and abandoned. You asked if I would be comfortable with "actually condemning the entire human population to living on subsistence scavenging?" No, that's why I oppose agriculture and advocate hunting and gathering, which provides bountifully. Only farmers starve. "You believe that children, the sick, and the mentally handicapped would be better off in the wild?" With their families (i.e., tribes) there to take care of them? Absolutely. Had they been there from the beginning, many would not have been sick or mentally handicapped to begin with. "Are you actually willing to close down the day care centers, the institutions, and the hospitals and personally wheel those people out into the fields and say, 'Best of luck to you buddy. Just remember, if you don't make it, its because evolution is a beautiful thing and you just happened to wind up on the wrong side of the genetic lottery.'"? Well of course not. That would be a very civilized thing to do. I'm a primitivist. I think we should close down the day care centers, the institutions, the hospitals and all the other places we dump the people we don't want, and put them into tribes that will actually take care of them, rather than simply abandon them and try to offload them however they can. As I said, I addressed these points in the Theses themselves, debunking the various racist myths of "savages" that you've repeated here. That's just not what primitive life is about. As for having pretty speeches and a lack of plans for the future, I think our plans are pretty specific.
Of course, for the weaker of stomach like Mr. Godesky, who secretly hope that some deus ex machina (or in his formulation, hominis ex machina), will do it for you. No need for revolutionaries to storm Shriners.
What have revolutionaries ever accomplished in the past? I'm continually mystified at the notion that failing to repeat the mistakes of the past makes me "cowardly." But collapse is hardly a deus ex machina. It's about the only way this whole mess could have ever gone.
And people like him are ready to make it in the wild. Beneath it all, you grasp that he hopes in his heart of hearts that it could happen today. Now. Right now. He's ready, just you wait.
When did I say I was ready? That's a good deal of my point, to encourage others to get ready.
Never mind that if he believed this deeply in his dream, he'd quit his job and go about trying to do everything he could to tear it all down. Best not to muddle one's conscience and convince yourself that society will do it for you.
Except that I've said that trying to actively take it down will make it last longer, and I've pointed out why that is. And I've pointed out why timing is a critical factor. But if you ignore that, and replace what I've actually said with a straw man of it, then yes, you can certainly paint me as a hypocrite. Never mind that we actually have made some great strides towards rewilding, but I'm sure that doesn't count, because that's only consistent with the arguments I've actually made, and not with the straw man you've invented for me.
It is certainly telling that it's always the same straw man, though.
Lastly, lets say he's right and I'm wrong. Do they seriously believe that a civilization can never rise again? Somewhere along the way, we did it once. One tribe went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. So if we return to being hunter-gatherers, what's to stop one tribe from deciding all over again to start farming.?
In the short term, the soil fertility. In the long term, the end of the Holocene. But in geological time, after fossil fuels and metals have replenished, another ice age has come and we get just the right interglacial, like the Eemian or the Holocene, yes, you might see another civilziation again. Of course, by then, we won't even be Homo sapiens any more, so I find that kind of speculation fairly useless. But it's certainly longer-lasting by several orders of magnitude than the "revolution" people keep telling me I should be advocating.
Short of nuclear winter, we'll never be able to completely eradicate all arable land to the point where nothing can grow.
Actually, we already have. Iraq was once home to a massive cedar forest. Agriculture has been destroying the soil for 10,000 years. Under several feet of petrochemical fertilizer, the Great Plains is already a desert. Very little naturally arable land remains on earth; what we farm now is almost entirely made fertile by the Green Revolution alone. In North America, for example, 85% of the mineral content in the soil just a century ago is gone today. It will be centuries before any significant areas of arable land exist again, and by then, the Holocene will be over.
Surely that evolution you revere so much is efficient enough to create a plant that can thrive even in denuded soils.
Quite a number, but only a very tiny handful of species have ever been domesticated. The world won't be devoid of life by any means, but that's not relevant to farmers. Farmers need a very specific set of closely-related, fickle cereal grains to grow.
And life abhors a vacuum. Someone will eventually discover all over again that the fastest way to gain power in a world where all previous forms of temporal power have been conveniently erased is through a civilization. Uh oh. Sorry Jason, it looks like we're just going to start all over again.
Where does the will to power come from, if not the experience of having no freedom? The original Agricultural Revolution arose from a very specific constellation of geological, ecological and climatological factors, factors that won't coincide again for millions of years. Homo sapiens won't even exist by that time. Predicting how an entirely different species of human might react to those conditions is beyond me.
(In case you want to argue that it'll be impossible for some reason blah blah, etc. etc., lack of resources, blah blah, don't forget the Infinite Monkey Theorem. With absolute certainty (i.e., probability equal to 1), we know that if you give a monkey who can live forever a keyboard that'll work forever, it will type the complete works of Shakespeare in chronological order not only once, but infinitely many times. That's how infinity works. A probability, no matter how small, as long as it is not zero, can happen with absolute certainty if the lifespan approaches infinity for all intents and purposes. This is mathematical fact, and I'll be glad to give anyone who asks the proof.)
It's also quite irrelevant. There probably will be pockets of civilization all the way down, but civilizations consume their soil and need to expand. With nothing to expand into, they'll die out quickly. It's like trying to start another fire after a forest fire; even if you get one going, it won't go for long, because most of what could be burned, already has been.
Mwahahaha I can be anonymous now!
It's Amy.
Anyway, I think the inherent flaw in your argument is that there can be no ultimate right or wrong in terms of what the human race does with itself. At different points in time it has been primitive and civilized, and various degrees of both, so how can you say that one "works" and the other "doesn't"? True, you could argue that the fact that a primitive state of being gave way to civilization means that it's necessarily an improvement, but the fact that there are in fact people like this who want to go back to being primitive proves that it doesn't work perfectly, because in a perfect society everyone would be happy. So I don't think it's that easy to decide what is right and what is wrong. There are certainly things about our society today that you must not agree with, but do you believe that since however things were before became this, we shouldn't try to change anything, and that the present state of things is always better than anything that came before it? You could certainly argue that, but I think it would be kind of a ridiculous claim to make. Also, the Nazi government developed from something that was certainly less bad than Hitler. So... I dunno.
So I think we can all have our opinions on how society should be, but there is NO way of proving which is more "natural" or "right."
As for the mentally ill and elderly getting fucked over, well... I hate to break it to you, but that is natural selection. If not for that, the world will become overpopulated and everyone will suffer, if not degrade into total individual warfare over scarce resources. In fact, we're kind of heading in that direction. Children will naturally have a better chance of surviving than the ill/elderly because of parental instincts, so that's okay.
Anyway I miss you being in Boston already and I hope Spain is fucking amazing!
Just to clear it up, in case Jason revisits here, I am both Nathanael and Chuck, the latter being my pseudonym; and the author of this critique is Brian aka BJ. So that should now be as clear as mud. Never expected Jason himself would end up here.
By the way, I'm now in Grinnell again, and I've blogged as well.
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