Archdruid Watch: Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age
by Jason GodeskyJohn Michael Greer’s post of last week, “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age,” was a very good one, and it led to a very interesting discussion about the role of agriculture in a sustainable community, one that attracted some attention. I would have liked to continue the discussion there, but after a particularly long post in which I answered the strongest claims fairly conclusively, and even brought the subject back around to Greer’s prefered topic of myth and narrative, my response was deleted. In it, I had suggested that Greer’s comparison of primitivism to mere apocalyptic cults was a caricature, as useless as me highlighting the shared history his worldview has with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. He took this out of context, and invoked “Godwin’s Law” to delete a thorough post that answered all of his strongest points. Obviously, this is an important discussion to have, but it is equally obvious that Greer will not tolerate open and fair discussion of it on his blog, instructing me to “post elsewhere in the future,” so I am forced to make my response here—and I feel compelled to respond, because already far too many of these points are being taken as “true.”
Greer’s original post contained some excellent observations about defining trends of what Greer calls “deindustrialization,” and I took the opportunity in the comments to offer another trend, what we’ve previously discussed here as “opening the map.” The response was, well, a little more personal than I expected:
As for the rest, well, of course from my perspective you’re stuck in an apocalyptic version of the trap Toynbee calls “archaism”—the dream of returning to an allegedly golden age in the distant past. As he documents, it’s a common fantasy among urban intellectuals during ages of decline. Since the mixed urban-rural economy (what you label “civilization”) has proven resilient over multimillennial time spans in the right ecosystems, and plenty of people are already working hard on the transition back to sustainable forms of it, I see no reason to think it’s going to up and die any time soon.
Readers of this website will note more than a few things wrong in this assertion, and I highlighted the general history of agriculture, and the constant ecological disaster that’s followed. To refer to the “Fertile Crescent” today is a cruel joke, but this was not always the case. Once, Iraq was covered in cedar forests; the deforestation that Gilgamesh sets to preserves some memory of how the first civilizations wiped out that abundance. Today, all that remains of that once vast forest are the few “cedars of Lebanon” mentioned in the Bible, depicted on the Lebanese flag, and limited to an increasingly endangered cluster in the north of the country. The arid desert we see today is the result of 10,000 years of agriculture. In the first episode of Guns, Germs & Steel, a three-part documentary version of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, archaeologist Mohammed Najjar at the site of an ancient agriculturalist village in Jordan, looked out over the desert landscape and said:
People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what when, when, when you, when you face the, the end, I mean you are facing the wall. You will end with landscape like that, mean with, with few trees, with no grass, and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over-exploiting the environment.
As agriculture turned the Fertile Crescent into a desert, farmers were forced into the pattern that would define agriculture over the next 10,000 years: expand and cultivate new land before your old soil was too depleted to contiue farming. Thanks to the “east-west axis” Diamond discussed, the farmers in the Fertile Crescent were able to do this by expanding east and west.
As agriculture expanded east, we can look at how China handled the problem of running into the Pacific Ocean. Rice was the cereal grain of choice, and rice agriculture is an incredibly labor-intensive form of farming. First, the rice paddy is flooded, then each rice plant must be planted by hand. Massive terracing projects obliterated whole mountain ranges, turning them into fields for rice farming. The flooding of rice paddies would create vast, flooded plains cut into plots and squares by narrow dry banks. Later in the season, the water would be drained for harvest. This pattern of flooding has apparently contributed to global warming for some time, supporting Ruddiman’s Early Anthropocene Hypothesis. When Chinese farmers began draining their fields earlier in the season to increase yield and reduce water costs in the 1980s, a NASA-funded study found a significant drop in methane emissions over the ensuing 20-year period.
The most obvious toll of China’s form of agriculture has been its forests. Forested mountains were cut into terraces; forests in the valleys were cut down to flood rice paddies. In prehistory, some 43% of modern China was forested. In 1948, prior to the introduction of modern agricultural techniques, that number was reduced to just 9.1%.
The slope below the Great Wall was cut with gullies, some of which were fifty feet deep. As far as the eye could see were gullies, gullies, gullies—a gashed and gutted countryside. The little stream that once ran past the city was now a wide waste of coarse sand and gravels which the hillside gullies were bringing down faster than the little stream had been able to carry them away. Hence, the whole valley, once good farmland, had become a desert of sand and gravel, alternately wet and dry, always fruitless. It was even more worthless than the hills. Its sole harvest now is dust; picked up by the bitter winds of winter that rips across its dry surface in this land of rainy summers and dry winters. (Smith, 1977)
The elimination of China’s forests have produced cascading ecological effects, including extinction, erosion, and flooding.
At one time nearly half of China was forested. The famous agricultural scholar, Georg Borgstrom estimates that 670 million acres of China were once covered. This forest, with its complex ecosystem was gone almost before written history. There is no doubt that it contained many species that became extinct and of which we will never know. One major consequence of the denudation of the vegetation of China is that its major rivers now carry more silt than any other river system in the world and the stories of the floods in China are as old as the Chinese empire. (Kötke, 1993)
The Taklamakan desert was once called “the Moving Sands,” because of how it advanced as Chinese agriculture caused desertification. This, too, is not new; over 300 ancient cities, once built on fertile ground, now lie under the desert. The chief means China has developed to deal with endemic overpopulation has been endemic famine, but deforestation, desertification and soil depletion continue.
For the last several thousand years, as the famine center has shifted around the world, waxed and waned, China has maintained a fairly steady course of starvation. Researchers have compiled documentary evidence of 1,828 famines in China between 2019 B.C. and A.D. 1911. They were concentrated in a famine belt between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which is to say that China’s hunger was concentrated in the same area as its agriculture. This history can be read in the numbers, but also in the language.
During China’s most recent famine, people began using an expression that means “swapping children, making food.” Hungry peasants traded children to avoid killing and eating their own. The practice was widespread. The specific phrase for this is about 2,200 years old and meant exactly then what it does now. As the Han Dynasty was founded, in 200 B.C., a single famine killed about half of China’s population. The emperor Gao Zu issued an edict permitting people to eat or sell their children as meat, thus lending legal sanction to a long-established practice. A written report from 2,600 years ago notes: “In the city, we are exchanging our children and eating them, and splitting up their bones for fuel.” (Manning, 2005)
If we look West, the picture does not change much. The cascade of Western civilization from Egypt, to Greece, to Rome, to Western Europe shows a distinct west-ward push that illustrates farmers trying to stay ahead of failing soils.
By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. (Manning, 2004)
Even as early as the Roman Empire, enormous birth rates were needed just to keep society afloat in the face of such catastrophic mortality.
Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population “grazed thin by death.” In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three. (Brown, 1988)
In the Middle Ages, the human toll of agriculture’s ecological devastation was even more oppressively bleak.
France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.” (Manning, 2002)
Western Europe was on the brink of collapse when Columbus discovered the New World, an expansion that gave a new lease on Western civilization’s life.
Discovery of the New World gave European man a markedly changed relationship to the resource base for civilized life. When Columbus set sail, there were roughly 24 acres of Europe per European. Life was a struggle to make the most of insufficient and unreliable resources. After Columbus stumbled upon the lands of an unsuspected hemisphere, and after monarchs and entrepreneurs began to make those lands available for European settlement and exploitation, a total of 120 acres of land per person was available in the expanded European habitat—five times the pre-Columbian figure! (Catton, 1982)
The wealth of the New World fueled the European empires, and the virgin soil that early colonialists began to deplete gave proof of how depleted Europe’s soil had become.
he new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil. (Manning, 2004)
Yet the New World was depleted even more quickly than the old one: by the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was forming over the Great Plains, the first sign of desertification—a situation very similar to that of the Sahel.
The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet’s supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.
The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency� of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet. (Manning, 2004)
“Dwarfism,” the key element of the “Green Revolution,” is nothing more than taking the trends of domestication to their logical conclusion: bigger seeds, shorter stems, in order to make plants easier to harvest and provide more food. This is the same thing domestication did–we meticulously bred plants, and produced domesticated varieties far removed from their wild ancestors, much further removed, in fact, than the distance between GMO’s and the typical domesticated varieties. Domestication of livestock involved trends towards neoteny and, frankly, stupidity. Cranial capacity in domesticated animals drops precipitously, because the cramped quarters even of the pastoral idyll do not allow for the roaming that ruminant herds are adapted to (this is precisely why overgrazing is not an occasional problem of pastoral mismanagement, but a problem intrinsic to all pastoralism). Once again, the modern CAFO merely takes this a step further. The factory farming of the “Green Revolution” is certainly an intensification of these trends, but it is not a departure in any way: it merely follows agrarian logic to its conclusion. It is the agrarian process that first denigrates a particular living landscape, filled with a diverse capacity for life, into nothing more than a cornfield going to waste. It is agriculture that gives us the logic of yields per acre, and to look at life only in its productive capacity. The Industrial Revolution merely allowed this logic to be taken to a new level and intensified, but it did not invent that logic. It had already been espoused by the settlers of the New World regarding the “wilderness,” and in Europe concerning land “wasted” by forest. Examples abound in all agrarian societies. And of course, that logic ultimately expanded to humans, as well; every agrarian society has also produced some version of the serf.
But Greer dismissed the primary experience of all of Europe, Asia, Africa, and both Americas as “Jason’s short list of places where agriculture has failed,” and supplied counter-examples of where it had worked, like Japan and southern Europe.
It was 2,300 years ago that Plato wrote about the impact of such “sustainable” methods in southern Europe:
What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. … Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.
By 500 BCE, Greek coastal cities had become landlocked due to deforestation, leading to soil erosion, filling in bays and the mouths of rivers; Plato wrote, “All the richer and softer parts have fallen away and the mere skelton of the land remains.” The Meander River become so silted that its course changed, weaving back and forth, giving us our word “meandering.” Greece suffered from massive soil erosion that degraded agricultural quality over the few centuries of the city-states. Greer later tried to avoid this direct evidence by suggesting:
Despite Jason’s claims, intensification of food production commonly took place in premodern times without expansion of arable land, and in Greece and many other places the wild lands of the periphery were protected by legal and religious safeguards from any human interference. (In Athens, again, if you let your cows graze in a sacred grove, the cows became the property of the god or goddess and were sacrificed—a definite incentive!)
This is, of course, true, and like the endemic famines in China, it served to slow the progress of agriculture’s toll to some degree. The sacred groves were walled off, and called in Latin templum, the root of the word “temple.” These did come attached with a great many strict religious taboos that did amount to an ancient form of wilderness designation. Of course, the Wilderness Act has not stopped the Green Revolution, and likewise, the sacred groves of Greece did not stop the city-states from expanding their hinterlands, to say nothing of new poleis.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the scale of the Greek economy grew during the Archaic period and if not per capita, at least in proportion to the clear growth in population. Population increases and the desire for more land were the primary impetuses for a colonizing movement that established Greek poleis throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions during this period. These new city-states put more land under cultivation, thereby providing the agriculture necessary to sustain the growing population.
As for Japan, Japanese agriculture is only some 2,000 years old, and inherits a great deal from Chinese agriculture, already discussed. For Jared Diamond, the forest management techniques of the Tokugawa regime exemplify a responsible social response; of course, the draconian methods the shogun implemented were necessary precisely because of the unsustainable nature of Japanese agriculture. They also require a very strong, central government, which requires a great deal of energy, itself unsustainable. William Farris’ Japan’s Medieval Population charts the Japanese population’s growth from 6 to 17 million from 1280 to 1600, due to increased agricultural food supply. By 1670, the population was closer to 30 million. Such population growth is not the mark of a sustainable society.
Rice paddies, as implemented in both Japan and China, do help limit the soil erosion that the Greek poleis experienced, but they come with other concerns, not least of which being the release of significant amounts of methane gas, contributing greatly to anthropogenic global warming. Some dismiss this on the grounds that rice paddies are ancient, while global warming is a recent phenomenon, but William Ruddiman’s “Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis” claims that global warming is nothing new. Rather, Ruddiman says that the current Holocene interglacial would have ended thousands of years ago, had deforestation and anthropogenic gases released from domesticated livestock not created a counter-balancing warming trend. The modern phenomenon of global warming, then, is not a change in kind, but in scale, breaking the delicate balance previously struck by the global warming caused by agriculture, against the earth’s natural cooling trend.
New evidence suggests that concentrations of CO2 started rising about 8,000 years ago, even though natural trends indicate they should have been dropping. Some 3,000 years later the same thing happened to methane, another heat-trapping gas. The consequences of these surprising rises have been profound. Without them, current temperatures in northern parts of North America and Europe would be cooler by three to four degrees Celsius–enough to make agriculture difficult. In addition, an incipient ice age–marked by the appearance of small ice caps–would probably have begun several thousand years ago in parts of northeastern Canada. Instead the earth’s climate has remained relatively warm and stable in recent millennia. (Ruddiman, 2005)
Neither has the current mass extinction only recently begun. The Green Revolution only began as arable land began to run out; for the first 10,000 years of its history, agriculture expanded chiefly through the cultivation of new land, interrupting and consuming natural habitats with the same effects as today. Before the Industrial Revolution, Europe had already been cultivated, the wolf exterminated, and most of its forests destroyed. Europe’s agrarian past drove the aurochs and the tarpan into extinction. The last European lions survived in the Caucasus until the 10th century. As mentioned above, China’s deforestation likewise led to significant extinction. We can only speculate as to what kind of fauna inhabited the great cedar forests of Iraq once upon a time. Wikipedia’s entry on Europe illustrates the trend:
As for the animals, in many parts of Europe most large animals and top predator species have been hunted to extinction. The woolly mammoth was extinct before the end of the Neolithic period. Today wolves (carnivores) and bears (omnivores) are endangered. Once they were found in most parts of Europe. However, deforestation caused these animals to withdraw further and further. By the Middle Ages the bears’ habitats were limited to more or less inaccessible mountains with sufficient forest cover.
On this subject, many will interject with the “Overkill Hypothesis,” the notion that hunter-gatherers caused the mass extinctions of the beginning of the Holocene. I’ve addressed this most thoroughly in, “Overkill, Overchill & Human Nature,” which points out the impossibility of the “pure” form of the hypothesis. In “Climate Change Caused Extinction of Big Ice Age Mammals, Scientist Says,” written for National Geographic News in November 2001, Hllary Mayell writes:
The overkill hypothesis, Grayson says, rests on five tenets: human colonization can lead to the extinction of island species; the Clovis people were the first humans to arrive in North America, around 11,000 years ago; the Clovis people hunted a wide range of large mammals; the extinction of many species of North American megafauna occurred 11,000 years ago; and therefore, Clovis hunting caused those extinctions.
Grayson disputes several of these tenets.
There is no proof, he said, that the late Pleistocene extinctions occurred in conjunction with the arrival of the Clovis people. “Of the 35 genera to have become extinct beginning around 20,000 years ago, only 15 can be shown to have survived beyond 12,000 years ago,” Grayson said. “The Clovis peoples didn’t arrive until shorty before 11,000 years ago. That leaves 20 [genera] unaccounted for.”
There is also no evidence that the Clovis people hunted anything other than mammoths, he said. Although numerous sites where large numbers of mammoths were killed have been uncovered, no similar sites for any other large mammals have been found in North America.
And while there is no evidence of widespread human-caused environmental change similar to that seen on island settings, there is evidence that animal populations in Siberia and Western Europe, as well as North America, were affected during the same period by climate changes and glacial retreat.
And it appears that bison, at least, were on the decline already when human hunters made their entrance. A report from USA Today says:
A team of 27 scientists used ancient DNA to track the hulking herbivore’s boom-and-bust population patterns, adding to growing evidence that climate change was to blame.
“The interesting thing that we say about the extinctions, is that whatever happened, it wasn’t due to humans,” said the paper’s lead author, Beth Shapiro, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Oxford University. By the time people arrived, “these populations are already significantly in decline and on the brink of whatever was going to happen to them in the future.”
The story written into the bison’s DNA is one of an exponential increase in diversity with herd sizes doubling every 10,200 years. Then, 32,000 to 42,000 years ago, the last glacial cycle kicked in, beginning a lengthy cooling trend. Bison genetic diversity plummeted. A significant wave of humans didn’t appear in the archaeological record at eastern Beringia until more than 15,000 years later, the authors write in Friday’s Science.
Opposed to the “Overkill” theory is the “Overchill” theory, the idea that the extinctions occurred because of climate change. But humans are very effective alpha predators, and any alpha predator causes extensive changes in its ecosystem. The consequences of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone is an instructive example. We should not expect the introduction of Homo sapiens into new ecologies to have gone much differently, and that would introduce stresses that may well have contributed to the extinction of species already pressured by climate change and other ecological changes. This says nothing about the rapacious nature of hunter-gatherers, anymore than Yellowstone’s dropping elk population says aything about the rapacious nature of wolves. What’s most important is that hunter-gatherers became native to a new ecology, found a place in it, and began to foster that ecology and make it more diverse and healthy for their prescence, as illustrated by Charles Mann in 1491.
This stands in stark contrast to the systemic elimination of wild habitat and the compulsion to constant growth that agriculture brings with it. It’s unclear what Greer means by “organic farming,” though. He obviously means something different by it than the USDA, or your local Whole Foods, and it seems to differ even from Joel Salatin’s vision for Polyface Farms. Is it the same as permaculture? I put that question to Greer, but he refused to answer it, instead deleting it.
To justify the deletion, Greer said, “Jason, you surely know that comparing opposing viewpoints to Nazism is the generally recognized internet signal that rational discourse has come to an end,” i.e., an appeal to Godwin’s Law. It is true, I did refer to the Nazis. Specifically, I said that while Greer’s connection of primitivism to various Christian apocalyptic cults does have some limited merit, in that there is a certain amount of parallels in narrative and a common history, it’s primarily an egregious caricature that obscures far more than it reveals. To illustrate that point, I pointed to the historical influences of the same Romantic and agrarian ideals that inspired Druidry, and how those same influences were so formative for the Nazi Party, a fact of history well-documented, particularly in Peter Staudenmaier’s “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents.” Now, Staudenmaier doesn’t call environmentalists Nazis, and my comparison did not call Greer, Druidry in general, or people who agree with him Nazis, either. In fact, the point of the comparison was to illustrate how empty such a comparison would be—just like Greer’s comparisons of primitivism to apocalypticism, as he did after deleting my defense: “… on the level of narrative, Biblical apocalyptic, ecological apocalyptic, and all the other species of apocalyptic strolling through the jungle of today’s collective consciousness are variations on the same theme, and when I talk about apocalyptic I’m referring to them all. The names of the players change—for example, ‘original sin’ in the Christian narrative becomes ‘private property’ in the Marxist narrative, ‘agriculture’ in the neoprimitivist narrative, and so forth—but it’s the same game. I’ve discussed this at more length in my post Immmanentizing the Eschaton, which you might want to take a look at.”
Several commenters missed even the point of apocalyptic literature, referring to its paralyzing fear of a doomed future, or neglecting the present world for the future one. Neither of these addresses the apocalyptic narrative, of course. Apocalyptic literature arises, historically, among oppressed minorities, and promises the restoration of Eden or Paradise, and the punishment of one’s oppressors. So a truly apocalyptic vision does not paralyze with fear, but mobilizes with hope. Apocalyptic is not about a doomed future, but the promise of a bright future on its way. As for neglecting the present world for the future one, we certainly see that in Christian apocalyptic, but this is not a feature of apocalyptic, but of dualism, which Christianity combines with apocalyptic. Bill Pulliam wrote of this latter belief, “I believe that this is what has divorced us from nature in spirit, consciousness, and day-to-day life. Not the plow.” I pointed out that Christian dualism came from Plato, via Stoicism, and that Plato’s world of Forms merely worked out the philosophical ramifications of the Greek alphabet, an innovation that could only make sense because of the plow—so even then, it was the plow.
Apocalyptic literature promises an oppressed minority that one day, they will be vindicated, and their oppressors will be punished. It gives hope precisely when hope seems most remote, and presents a reason to carry on at the very moment that no other cause remains. The effect of apocalyptic throughout history has been precisely the opposite of what was supposed, because the apocalyptic narrative is actually very much the opposite of what it was presented as: apocalyptic has inspired oppressed minorities to persevere when nothing else could, because a better world was coming.
But even if an accurate view of apocalyptic narrative was permitted in the thread, it would still not do justice to the primitivist narrative. Even then, it would remain a pigeon-holing caricature, every bit as outrageous as calling Greer a Nazi. Greer considers his own narrative “cyclical,” and points to succession. Of course, cyclical and apocalyptic are hardly mutually exclusive: the Emergence mythology so common among the tribes of the American southwest illustrate this nicely. They consider current events to be leading up to the fourth, fifth or even sixth apocalypse, repeating in a cycle.
If we were to consider what myths speak most directly to primitivists as we see ourselves, rather than the labels outsiders might project onto us, I would come up with a story from the Bible, but not the Book of Revelations; rather, I would cite Luke 15:11-32, the parable of the Prodigaal Son. The son’s sudden, insane demand to leave his home behind and strike out on his own with his inheritance illustrates the hubristic ambitions and folly of the Agricultural Revolution; the inheritance, the wealth of the living earth, which we squandered on “riotous living.” Life as a swineherd points to the squalor of serfdom and the misery of the “long descent” that Greer promises. But ultimately, the son comes to his senses and tries to go home to try to throw himself on his father’s mercy, and much to his surprise, his father welcomes him home with open arms. We expect our return to human life to be a difficult thing, but the myth tells us that the living world waits patiently to welcome us home. Paul Shepard’s books were formative for primitivism, and the title of Coming Home to the Pleistocene speaks directly to this basic mythic structure, and throughout primitivist literature, the common theme is not one of approaching apocalypse, but of lost heritage. In fact, most of the major primitivist writers have never commented on collapse at all, so it seems difficult to suggest apocalypse as the model of primitvist narrative. The primitivist narrative does not focus on the apocalyptic, but rather, on the inheritance we have squandered, and hope to regain.
I suspect that Greer and I agree on far more than we disagree. I suspect that what he means by “organic farming” is little more than a very confusing term for permaculture, and I suspect that it’s just that confusion that’s lead him to make such bizarre claims as to the sustainability of ancient Greek agriculture, or Japanese agriculture. When pressed for examples, he cites permacultural techniques, and then conflates their success with the unmitigated failures of agriculture. He writes, “notice that your definition of agriculture assumes not only monoculture but a radically incomplete nutrient cycle, and neither of these is necessarily the case.” That would be, itself, a fairly radical redefinition of agriculture—obliterating the anthropological divide between agriculture and horticulture, as well as the popular understanding of the “farmer” and his field of crops.
I suspect we’re ultimately of like mind, too, given the way Greer has tried to pigeon-hole me, rather than understand me. He claimed several times in the thread that I “know only one story,” referring to an article where he writes:
For fundamentalist Christians, it’s the story of Fall and Redemption ending with the Second Coming of Christ. For Marxists, it’s the very similar story of dialectical materialism ending with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For rationalists, neoconservatives, most scientists, and quite a fair number of ordinary people in the developed world, it’s the story of progress. The political left and right each has its own story, and the list goes on.
There is an assumption of “purity” on the part of primitivism here that simply doesn’t hold up. No actual primitive society was ever “pure.” Primitive peoples are brilliantly pragmatic; they make use of any useful tool they might have, and just as easily discard anything that’s become more trouble than it’s worth. Hunter-gatherers exist on a continuum with permaculturalists. Permaculturalists need to do some amount of hunting to complete their diet, and to remain sustainable, so that “zone 5″ remains an economic necessity, and not simply an ethical imperative. By the same token, every hunter-gatherer uses permacultural techniques to one degree or another, whether scattering seedballs around a favored campsite, or periodic burning to encourage game. To whatever degree modern-day primitivists pursue “purity,” then to that degree they have some more to learn about what primitive life is really about.
So, my suspicion is that Greer and I probably more or less share a compatible vision of the future, and we likely even have a good deal of the same narrative structure. Unfortunately, Greer has not yet answered any of my points, or any narrative that I actually follow; instead, he’s responded to caricatures of my narratives, and straw men that vaguely resemble my points. That makes it difficult to know how much agreement we really have, and how much disagreement.
I hope we can continue our discussion fairly here, and I even hope that Greer will join us and clear up what he’s left to the imagination. If nothing else, at least here no one needs to worry whether ther response will be deleted for making a good point.
Works Cited
Catton, C. (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Kötke, W.H. (1993). The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. Portland: Arrow Point Press.
Mann, C. (2002). “1491,” The Atlantic Monthyl, March 2002.
Manning, R. (2004). “The Oil We Eat,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2004.
Manning, R. (2005). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press.
Ruddiman, W. (2005). “How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?” Scientific American, March 2005.
Smith, J.R. (1977). Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair Co.
Update
31 May 2007. Thanks to “Chiggles,” I now have a copy of the original comment that JMG deleted.
Jhereg, I’ve been talking all along about mixed-crop organic gardening and farming, not mass industrial monoculture. Historically, foraging has played some role in most food production systems, though the boundary between foraging and food production is a hard one to draw—there’s good evidence for people deliberately planting food plants as far back as the Paleolithic to make “foraging” easier.
This is absolutely true—precisely the foraging-permaculture continuum I was talking about. So, I think we’ve established that for you, “organic agriculture” goes beyond anything you’d find at Whole Foods, or even at Salatin’s Polyface Farm. Sounds like we might be on the same page, after all. I’m wondering, would you consider what you’re calling “organic agriculture” different from permaculture?
As for why I don’t respond point by point to all the people who post their apocalyptic theories here at vast length … not least because such debates rarely go anywhere.
Now that’s hardly fair. I’ve changed my worldview around quite a few times, whenever I was adequately convinced of something. And while you may feel comfortable pigeonholing my stance as “apocalyptic,” this would be no more accurate, revealing, or fair as when I pigeonhole yours as “Romantic.” You couch your story in the natural process of succession and the idea of cycles (even though it’s quite clear that anthropogenic global warming, mass extinction of the current scale, and similar problems exist outside any previous established pattern); my own story is couched in the language of natural selection (civilization as an unfit pattern that very quickly eliminates itself; civilization’s end as selective pressure, etc.). Now, of course, it’s true that my story is vaguely reminiscent of stories that have fallen flat in the past. And it’s also true that your story somewhat resembles that used by eugenicists, racists, and ultimately the Nazis. If it’s fair to pin “the Great Disappointment” on me, isn’t it at least as fair to pin the Holocaust on you? In both cases, we’re taking the very worst examples of those who have historically espoused vaguely similar narratives. Needless to say, I don’t think this approach is helpful at all. The very basic narratives are vanishingly few in number, and recur in all times and places, wired as they are into the human brain. That means that the Devil, as they say, really is in the details. To simply dismiss all “apocalyptic” scenarios amounts to little more than handwaving and little more than a simple dismissal. Of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to reject a particular narrative for your own needs, but your continuing insinuations that any different narrative is, sight unseen, inferior, much less that by holding it someone must be a stubbon fanatic incapable of listening to reason, is more than a little much.
I wouldn’t ask you to dwell on the subject, but one, good, solid reason to dismiss that view would be sufficient—if it were actually a good reason, and not mere handwaving. Otherwise, I would think you’d owe us a little more courtesy than your insinuations to date have left.
In response to Jason’s short list of places where agriculture has failed, for example, I could point to southeastern Europe, where grain farming has been continuously practiced for well over 7000 years and is still chugging away; to Japan, where rice farming was sustainably practiced from the late Jomon period 4000 years ago until the coming of industrial agriculture; and to many others.
My “short list” included most of agriculture’s 10,000 year history, from its origins to the New World. I’m afraid your counter-examples don’t hold up, though. Southern Europe was precisely the area that Plato watched being depleted. Today, the EU is still distressed over southern Europe’s faling soils: “In southern Europe nearly 75 per cent of the soil has an organic matter content—a measure of fertility—so low that it is a cause for concern.” And yes, the past 7,000 years of such “successful” agriculture in southern Europe is now turning it, too, into a desert.
Japan’s endemic problem with deforestation was partially solved under the shogunate by draconian laws, and greater energy applied by the government, but even then, Japan’s “sustainable” agriculture continued degrading the soil. “Night soil” slowed this process, as it did in China, but the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy should be sufficient to prove that this can only slow the process. Since the Meiji period, deforestation has again become a problem. And Japan, too, is facing desertification.
Now, maybe you can dismiss that as simply an example of an “equal and opposite fact,” but I fail to see how you can point to an example of “sustainable” agriculture where they’ve deforested the environment, depleted the soil, and turned the region into a desert in just a few thousand years. These are really shockingly short timelines to experience such total failure over. I already showed this general pattern of failure to be true for the wide swath of agricultural history, and it’s true even for the “sustainable” examples you found. I don’t think this is as ambiguous as competing sets of equally valid facts—it seems quite clear to me that the facts point in a very clear direction, that agriculture is inherently unsustainable. It’s hardly difficult to see why. Ecology is about relationship, and agriculture breaks relationships to create vast monocultures. Sure, it scales more, but it also suffers from the costs of homogeneity: soil failure, global warming (see Ruddiman’s “Early Anthropocene Hypothesis”), and desertifcation.
Some people point to so-called types of “agriculture” that actually restore soil, but in every case I know of, what they point to is what Holmgren called “permaculture,” or what anthropologists typically consider horticulture. It restores soil precisely because it pays attention to the relationships plants have formed over their evolution, and doesn’t monocrop. In fact, most such gardens look more like “wilderness” to the Western eye, what some practitioners have started to call “food forests.” I wonder if this is what you mean when you talk about your own “organic farming.” Of course, such techniques could hardly be more alien to the typical concept of the farm, with its tilled fields of monocropped cereal grains.
But the other catch is that intercropping doesn’t scale as well as farms do. They can be even more productive, but they defy mass harvesting, whether modern, mechanized harvesting, or the earlier form of mass harvesting made possible by the scythe. Horticultural societies produced villages, not cities, and today, while permaculturalists have an easy enough time providing for similarly scaled communities, even in the midst of the city, they have not so far translated well into things like Farmer’s Markets, to make them available at a larger scale. So, if this strategy were pursued, you’d still end up with, at best, what some scholars on post-Roman Britain have called “life in towns, not town life” (though the remains at Wroxeter and other towns certainly complicate that characterization for post-Roman Britain itself). The settlement patterns of the Ik in Uganda show a similar shift: settling in the shape of a village, without any functional village life.
Which is to say that while sustainable levels of cultivation can certainly support villages, the scale needed to keep a city alive are fundamentally unsustainable. Ecologies never evolved with cities in mind, after all. We’re at a fairly high trophic level, and living at such densities has an impact. Ants can pull it off, but humans fundamentally can’t.
I could go on at much more length along the same lines, or tackle the metallurgical issues involved in salvage blacksmithying—I have a hatchet made from a chunk of dead car, which might make a good starting point for that—but it would be wasted breath.
Not at all; these are useful skills. Of course, to prove their important to the scale of a society, their feasibility at all is only slightly more important than their scalability. I have no doubt you have such a hatchet, and that it’s quite effective. But how much rusted metal do you need per hatchet? How well would it work out if you needed to outfit a city’s worth of workers with such hatchets—and then continue replacing broken ones, etc., on a continuing basis? By the same token, I know full well of techniques like King’s, and they’re really much more closely related to permaculture than agriculture in my mind, but they also don’t scale up to feeding a city. They can be even more productive, but they’re more difficult to harvest and transport to market.
When it comes to keeping our society going, scale is one of the most important questions to answer. Almost anything is viable for one; very little works for billions, or even millions.
It’s been my experience that people who are committed to a given narrative don’t change their minds in response to facts; they only change their minds, if at all, when the discussion is approached on the level of the narrative itself.
I’ve had that same experience of others, but for myself, I’ve been forced to give up deeply cherished narratives, kicking and screaming, because the facts simply didn’t fit. Anomie follows, until I find a new narrative that accounts for the newly discovered facts. That’s how I left the Roman Catholic Church, and then how I left the Quinnian school of primitivism. It’s not something I’ve done easily or lightly, but when the facts are there, there’s no denying them. So, there’s an exception to every rule; my own experience is proof of that.
But by the same token, while you’re insinuating that I’m a closed-minded, apocalyptic zealot, can it not also be turned around on you? Can you confront your narrative in the face of challenging facts?
One point I’ll add here is that hunter-gatherer societies also go through cycles of boom and bust, just like agricultural ones—look at the evidence for cultural breakdown and population loss in the transition between the Magdalenian and Azilian cultures in paleolithic Europe, or the collapse of the Clovis culture in post-ice age North America.
Hunter-gatherers do go through cycles of feasting and hunger, though the hunger element never goes as far as starvation. I’ve actually had quite a bit to say about the example of the beginning of the current interglacial, particularly the ill-founded “Overkill” hypothesis, so often baldly asserted as fact to denigrate hunter-gatherers, despite the significant holes in the theory. But it’s certainly true that foragers have good days and bad; I don’t think anyone denied that. But the crests of what we might consider the forager quality of life sine wave never depleted the foundation of forager life, as it does in agriculture. That is a significant difference.
Thus pointing to the fact that China has had cycles of famine, for example, doesn’t make Chinese culture unsustainable—quite the contrary, its ability to weather normal population and climate cycles for more than 5000 years is one of the best pieces of evidence for its sustainability.
Well, the constant state of starvation and plague did slow down collapse, but it did not stop it. In spite of massive mortality, population contiued to grow. Desertification is not a new phenomenon in China; the deserts have been steadily growing over the millennia. Folklore preserves memories of some 300 cities, once surrounded by green fields, that have since been swallowed by the Gobi Desert.
But these are hardly examples of sustainable societies. Plague and starvation are means of limiting unsustainability, but these are simply societies collapsing on a slightly longer timeline. Few experiments in evolution have been so disastrous that they destroyed themselves in only 10,000 years, a blip that would scarcely leave any paleontological evidence for later researchers at all. Constant starvation helps make Chinese agriculture slightly less catastrophic, but even so, the population is larger after each famine, and each famine is worse than the last. This is not a stable population cycle; this is the very definition of unsustainability.
You’ve got your preferred mythic narrative—a classic narrative of apocalypse in which evil gets punished and the righteous survive and prosper by returning to the Good Old Ways. As you’ve suggested, I’ve got a different narrative, one that has links with the Romantic movement but actually goes back a good deal further.
Mine, also, goes back a good deal further, but you’ve chosen to ignore that and instead present a caricature of my narrative. Isn’t it equally fair to caricature yours? If we were to be fair, we’d need to both admit that both narratives have their strong points, their weak points, and sufficient grounding in ecology (yours in succession, mine in natural selection) to bear some attention, and at the very least, some respect. Even though I don’t think it does a very good job of explaining our present predicament, I can certainly see that your cyclical narrative is the basic narrative of human existence. Unfortunately, you appear to have a heavily vested interest in maligning and marginalizing my own narrative, generally by pointing to the most absurd caricatures of it promoted by those I fundamentally disagree wth. Once again, we could do the same to your narrative and come away with charges of eugenics for you. Is this useful? I don’t think it is. With so few basic narratives in the human brain, every one of them has had its good moments and its bad moments. It’s much more useful to ask how well each narrative suits the present situation, not how it’s failed in the past.
The argument I’ve been making in this blog all along is that the narrative I’ve been proposing—the myth of cyclic change—is a more useful tool for making sense of our current historical situation than such more popular narratives as the myth of progress or the myth of apocalypse. Obviously you disagree, but that’s the level where the disagreement lies, and that’s the level on which this blog is trying to discuss the issue.
Obviously, but mustn’t that discussion take into consideration just what our current situation is? The question of whether “sustainable agriculture” is an oxymoron lies at the very heart of what narrative is most useful. If I’m right, then the narrative of cyclical nature is worse than useless, because it encourages us to keep trying at what’s already failed. And if you’re right, then my narrative is useless here. What constitutes our current historical situation is very much part of the question, so I fail to see how this is an irrelevant or tangential discussion.
One more point. You’ve asked me to clarify the difference between agrarian and industrial societies and subsistence modes, and that’s a fair request, not least because the two have profoundly different mythic structures. That’s going to take an entire post, though, and it’ll have to come after the current sequence is finished. All in good time.
I look forward to it, though I’m obviously skeptical. The popularity of classical, agrarian gods to symbolize the virtues of industry hardly seems ill-considered or even ill-fitting. The logic of factory is, I think, quite clearly presaged by the logic of the monocropped corn field.
Jason (again), notice that your definition of agriculture assumes not only monoculture but a radically incomplete nutrient cycle, and neither of these is necessarily the case. You really should read King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries; he documents that polyculture and systematic nutrient recycling have been used in eastern Asia to maintain urban societies over millennial time scales. For that matter, not only the Maya but the entire Mexican suite of civilizations maintained urban societies over the long term, despite drastic climate shifts, using a polyculture that took corn, beans and squash as a foundation but added close to a hundred other crops to the mix.
These techniques usually fall under the heading of “permaculture,” rather than “agriculture,” because agriculture is defined by monocropping and a radically incomplete nutrient cycle (hence its unsustainability). Most non-Western civilizations did use some amount of permaculture, including southeast Asia and the Mayans. The Mesoamerican triad or “Three Sisters” is often used as the prime example of a permacultural guild. On the other hand, the bulk of the Mayan diet did come from chiampas, isolated plots that did tend towards monocropping and a breakdown of plant relationships. This is why Mesoamerica suffered from a cycle of collapse; they would deplete the soil, then the soil would regenerate enough for another civilization to start up, which would deplete the soil again and collapse. Like “night soil,” it helped slow the process, but it wasn’t enough to reverse it because the scale was simply too big. Teotihuacan, then the Toltecs, then the Mexica, all quickly outgrew their sustainable resource base, and were forced to invade their neighbors to maintain their civilization as their heartland failed. Again, this is hardly sustainable.
King’s book was one of the fundamental sources for modern organic agriculture—one of the many reasons why I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the last century’s advances in organic farming render your claims about the inevitability of agricultural failure obsolete.
This really does sound very much like permaculture. Again, what difference would you draw between what you call “modern organic agriculture” (obviously something different from what my nearest Whole Foods means by those words), and permaculture? I’ll readily admit that what I’ve said of agriculture does not extend to permaculture, but in anthropological terms, those are like night and day.
Small-scale organic market farming, using polyculture and intensive nutrient recycling, seems to be more popular on the left coast than in your end of the country—certainly friends of mine from the eastern states seem astonished by the profusion of farmers markets in every small town in the Pacific Northwest—so you may not be familiar with the extent to which organic polyculture is becoming standard practice. It’s a factor that has to be taken into account in any realistic view of the future.
I’m well aware of it, I’m just wondering to what extent you might be conflating the words “agriculture” and “farming” with techniques that have little or no historical association with such terms, and have typically been dismissed by farmers as the inefficient gardening methods of “savages.”
The three examples I cited above all have had agriculture continuously since it was first introduced there; it’s hardly a strike against agriculture that it hasn’t had a longer history than the time from its introduction to the present!
No, but it is a strike against it that after that period of agricultural history, it is now less suitable for agriculture than it was originally.
I’d encourage you to look into the agricultural history of premodern Japan in particular. Intensification took place by maximizing the efficiency of the nutrient cycle, and forests and watersheds were protected by laws dating from the Nara period and rigorously enforced by the Tokugawa government right up to the beginning of industrialization.
Which very effectively slowed the problems already arising from deforestation, but soil depletion continued throughout the shogunate, as did desertificaton. Hardly the outcomes one expects of a sustainable agriculture. Wouldn’t a sustainable agriculture increase soil fertility, and reduce deserts? And yet, all these examples of “sustainable agriculture” have, over the long term, had the opposite effect.
Snowshoe hares and countless other species cycle through population booms and busts, and ecologists consider them to be successfully adapted to their environment. Human beings are no different—whatever their mode of subsistence.
That is true, but I think you may be leaning on this a little too heavily: snowshoe hares typically do not starve to death. Nature is not quite as “red in tooth and claw” as once conceived, and natural selection typically employs far less lethal methods to the same end. A period of hunger may be all that’s needed. It is only large imbalances and major overshoots that require dieoff to correct. The lethality of famines and plagues certainly suggest that we have departed a good deal more from equilibrium than a simple undulation of a snowshoe hare population in the face of more lynx. The fact that these have had so little impact on our population all but proves it. Of course, the snowshoe hare example is the classic illustration of the Lotka-Volterra cycle, and it was Alfred Lotka who wrote in 1925, “The human species, considered in broad perspective, as a unit including its economic and industrial accessories, has swiftly and radically changed its character during the epoch in which our life has been laid. In this sense we are far removed from equilibrium—a fact that is of the highest practical significance, since it implies that a period of adjustment to equilibrium conditions lies before us, and he would be an extreme optimist who should expect that such adjustment can be reached without labor and travail. … While such sudden decline might, from a detached standpoint, appear as in accord with the eternal equities, since previous gains would in cold terms balance the losses, yet it would be felt as a superlative catastrophe. Our descendants, if such as this should be their fate, will see poor compensation for their ills and in fact that we did live in abundance and luxury.”
I reject the apocalyptic narrative because I believe it’s incompatible with sustainability. If we want to create a sustainable post-industrial world, we can’t base our lives on the idea that humanity is progressing toward a hell on earth. It just doesn’t work.
That wouldn’t be an apocalyptic narrative, though. Apocalyptic always ends with the restoration of Eden or Paradise. The “hell on earth” is simply what happens to the “unfaithful,” who are swept away, making room for the “faithful.”
Which, of course, is simply the course of natural selection, and no doubt why the narrative appeals so much. If we see fitness, whatever it may be, as a virtue, then natural selection is apocalyptic: those who lack virtue (are unfit) are swept away, leaving the world for those who have the virtue (are fit). The virtue might be a sustainable way of life, or faith in a particular deity, the outline remains essentially the same.
That’s not at all the same as “hell on earth,” unless you’re dead set on staying in the cities.
Apocalyptic fears leave us either apathetic or paranoid. Struck with fear, we’re likely to cause more problems than we solve. Neither the self-destructive type nor the lone wolf survivalist will be very useful to anyone in a time of crisis and adaptation.
Historically, apocalyptic literature has been produced by persecuted minorities. What they offer has never been fear or paranoia, but rather hope (possibly misplaced, but hope nonetheless), and thus the will to persevere in the face of adversity and even persecution, by promising that one day your persecutors will fall and your stance that seems so outlandish now will be vindicated. In this particular case, it tells people to keep on learning primitive skills and expanding permaculture and living sustainably, despite the adversity you might face, because when civilization finally kills itself, those who persecute you now and remain dependent on it will die along with it, while we who left it behind will live in a world beyond civilization.
There is nothing unnatural in an organism modifying its environment to make it more suitable for its own kind. Beavers make dams and clear forests, chaparral plants evolve enhanced flammability to promote brush fires and wipe out the less fire-resilient competitors, walnuts poison their root zone, woodpeckers excavate cavitities.
Absolutely, and I don’t hear anyone saying otherwise. But domestication is a far cry from any of the various relationships found in nature (symbiosis, parasitism, etc.), and there is no other animal that uses anything like a field of wheat. It’s not modifying the environment that makes it “unnatural” (whatever “unnatural” might mean), it is the nature of the modification that is unsustainable, and damaging to the ecology we depend upon.
I am not implying, nor does Firestone, that people can not change, but that in general most people will not change. It truly is a strenuous task to short-circuit the seemingly never-ending layers that compose our personal narratives, and re-write one’s own. That being said, the first task is to acknowledge our narratives and understand how they shape behavior, both personal and societal.
Not getting what you want is certainly one way that daily life can contradict a narrative, but as you illustrated, it’s one way that we’re quite adapted to dealing with.
Rather, imagine a farmer (in the traditional sense of the word) who holds a narrative about the world as an interrelated place. Yet he has to go out every day, and rip out anything from his field that isn’t wheat, chase off all the animals and insects that try to relate to his plants, and generally wage war on the local ecology that keeps trying to move his field back to a higher state of succession. If he’s able to maintain that narrative, then it can only be the narrative about how his enemy operates, a merciless, undefeatable foe that he must, nonetheless, do battle against every day to make his living.
Or, imagine a hunter-gatherer who tries to keep our narrative of a universe of things. He sees the trees, but misses the forest; he doesn’t expect relationship to have a very big role, he’s looking for the various constituent elements instead. He misses the emergent processes, the feedback loops that give his home life. How good of a tracker could he be? How good of a gatherer? Not very. A non-animist forager is a hungry forager; that’s why animism was once universal.
In my own experience, I was very timid about humanity’s prospects, until I took a weekend course in wild edibles. It gave me such a rush of confidence that I realized, then and there, that primitive skills were the foundation of freedom. Without them, you could never be free; with them, you could never be subjugated. How do you compel someone who can scrape a salad off the forest floor to work 9-to-5, unless he wants to? My narrative changed drastically, almost overnight, because my daily reality had changed. I was no longer entirely subservient; I’d had a brief taste of freedom, and it made me hungry for more, and showed me that it really was within my reach. After that, no narrative of submission or sacrifice would ever suffice again. The daily life of a civilized person cowed me and made narratives of submission and service seem perfectly all right, but after just a small change in my daily experience, none of those narratives could hold water for me anymore.
I also imagine “apocalyptic” narratives will adequately describe most people’s experience, because most people will not be successful in the most apocalyptic sense of the word, despite their convictions; the ability to maximize one’s opportunities surly does not reside not in the strength of one’s convictions.
No, it resides mostly in imagination. Living in the midst of the fall of the Norse Greenland colony must have been awful. That doesn’t change the fact that a single fisherman could have changed his fate. Fishing is hardly what I’d call odious—today it’s mostly done as recreation. And yet, a single fisherman could have provided for himself and many others besides. The strength of one’s convictions is meaningless, but imagination is everything. The end of civilization is a fiery end only for those who lack the imagination to move beyond civilization.
And this is where I agree that apocalyptic mythology is dangerous. It leaves many western minds feeling that “this” world is both doomed and of secondary importance. So what does it really matter if we tear it apart; there’s nothing to do about it anyway, the end of everything comes just the same.
This, again, is not the apocalyptic narrative. Only in some versions of the story is the present world divorced from the future one. In primitivist apocalyptic, they are very much the same, and the driving goal becomes the protection of as much of the present world as possible as civilization finishes its colossal hari kari, because that will be the inheritance of the post-civilized world. In order to get to the version of the apocalyptic narrative you’re outlining, you need to mix apocalyptic with dualism. In fact, even without apocalyptic, dualism still tells people that there is another, more important world, and encourages us to neglect this world. Even without apocalyptic, Christians would still care nothing for the ecological disasters of this world, because it is not their true home. Paul makes no mention of the eschaton as he extols Christians to not be of this world. So apocalyptic really has nothing to do with it whatsoever; rather, what you’re talking about is dualism.
I believe that this is what has divorced us from nature in spirit, consciousness, and day-to-day life. Not the plow.
Chicken or the egg? The Christian apocalypse that divorces this world from “the next” is the grandchild by way of Stoicism of Plato’s world of Forms, and Plato merely worked out the philosophical ramifications of a written alphabet finally divorced from any interaction with the living world. And that became possible because of the transformation of daily life from a forager’s life that requires animism, to a farmer’s life where the living world must be conquered, the shift to agrarian religions and polytheism that supported an agrarian lifestyle. Though it oscillates back and forth from the utilitarian to the ideological, the fact remans that the origin point for this transformation does indeed go back to the Agricultural Revolution. So it is the plow.
I just thought I’d also add that if we can smelt metal for simple tools out of rusty old cars and revitalize dead soil in order to feed people who might otherwise starve, I certainly won’t sit there and object because “that’s just not primitive!”
You wouldn’t be much of a primitive if you did. Primitive peoples are nothing if not practical; they’ll accept any tool that makes their lives easier (and just as quickly leave behind any tool that’s more than it’s worth). The notion of “purity” can only really exist in an agricultural mind, by comparison to a “pure” field of crop, devoid of weeds and other “contaminations.” While we’ve often translated primitive concepts of ritual fitness as “purity,” it really doesn’t quite fit.
Despite Jason’s claims, intensification of food production commonly took place in premodern times without expansion of arable land, and in Greece and many other places the wild lands of the periphery were protected by legal and religious safeguards from any human interference. (In Athens, again, if you let your cows graze in a sacred grove, the cows became the property of the god or goddess and were sacrificed—a definite incentive!)
And again, this only slowed the problem, like other safeguards. The wild lands did diminish over time, as the land under cultivation failed (as Plato described) and had to be expanded. You’re right, sometimes they were able to increase production without increasing cultivated land, and I’ve said as much, but I’ve also said that this was unreliable. There’s no guaranteeing a technological breakthrough just because you need it. And so, under the guise of temples being overthrown or myths of gods’ falls, the wilderness dedicated to a particular temple would be opened up for cultivation. By the time the Romans came, Greece was already well along the road to complete desertification.
If you want to choose the apocalyptic one, that’s your right, but believing in apocalypse has been a fertile source of disaster in the past and I suspect it will be even more productive of suffering and death in the near future.
And the same is true of the cyclical narrative you’ve chosen, which is precisely why such estimations have so little value. This is really nothing more than a slightly more academic form of pigeon-holing, a straw man argument. Statements like these don’t respond to the primitivist case that I and others have laid out, but to a purist caricature of it. That’s hardly a fair assessment, anymore than it would be fair for me to paint Druidry as deluded eco-fascists. So perhaps we can move past this and address one another’s narratives, and how well they fit our current situation, rather than pointless caricatures.
Update
13 June 2007. This is going to become a regular, weekly feature in response to Greer’s regular, weekly attacks, since the people he likes to attack are not permitted to respond in his comments. I’ve changed the names and categories to reflect this article’s shift as the first in a continuing, weekly feature. What will be the regular “bumper” follows:
John Michael Greer’s “Archdruid Report” comes out every Wednesday, and one of his favorite topics is the failing of primitivism, or “apocalyptic narrative,” as he prefers to pigeon-hole it. Unfortunately, Greer also thinks that actual primitivists stopping by in the comments to defend their “apocalyptic narrative” side-tracks the disucssion of how looney and wrong their narrative is. Primitivists who try to answer Greer’s attacks are eventually censored and banned. Enter “Archdruid Watch,” a weekly response to Greer’s weekly attack, on a forum that encourages discussion and dissenting views, rather than squelches them from the bully pulpit. If you think we’re wrong, by all means say so. It’s not as though we’ll delete what you have to say just because you make a good point—and that’s not something all blogs involved here can say.
- Next Week: A Depopulation Explosion?
Hey Jason,
Do you think that there is anything inherent in the holocene which agriculture requires (aside from the build up of topsoil?
If the future is colder or warmer or dryer or wetter, doesn’t that just mean differetn plants in different places?
Comment by Matthew Jewkes — 30 May 2007 @ 5:21 PM
Think about that: different plants in different places would mean wildly different types of cultivation. Very few plants are domesticable, so if a new climate makes cereal grains marginal, then you can’t really rely on domesticated species anymore—you have to deal with the whole wide, wild world in all its scary relations. So yes, I absolutely think that agriculture is deeply connected to the Holocene. It’s created by the Holocene, adapted to the Holocene, and only possible in the Holocene. It’s a Holocene adaptation, and when the Holocene ends, so does agriculture’s time on the stage.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 May 2007 @ 5:27 PM
Jason, thank you for this post! As I said in another thread on this blog, I’d been following the discussion between you and John Michael Greer over at the Archdruid Report with a great deal of interest, and I was taken aback and seriously disappointed when JMG decided to remove your long (and excellent) post. Therefore, I am glad, both for my own sake and (especially) for the sake of others who had been following that discussion and who did not get a chance to read your comments before they got deleted, that you decided to recycle that post here.
Now, concerning narratives, JMG’s comments:
[quote]… on the level of narrative, Biblical apocalyptic, ecological apocalyptic, and all the other species of apocalyptic strolling through the jungle of today’s collective consciousness are variations on the same theme, and when I talk about apocalyptic I’m referring to them all. The names of the players change—for example, ‘original sin’ in the Christian narrative becomes ‘private property’ in the Marxist narrative, ‘agriculture’ in the neoprimitivist narrative, and so forth—but it’s the same game.[/quote]
When I read comments such as this one, I get the impression that JMG is divorcing the narrative from the material reality in which we live, which makes him sound like an academician in the worst sense of that word. The fact that A and B have vaguely analogous narratives means precisely nothing unless you can show that the material conditions that A and B face are also analogous. Jason, I recall your making the point in your original post at the Archdruid Report (a point that I don’t see you repeating it here) that humans have a fairly small number of basic narratives, and that each of those narratives will work well in some situations and backfire in others. It’s an important point. We have the fact that the Christian fundamentalists awaiting the second coming of Christ sound vaguely similar to the primitivists predicting the end of civilization. But exactly what reason do we have to believe that Christ is coming any time now? On the other hand, we have excellent reasons (outlined on this blog, among other sources) to believe that, despite the fact civilization managed to recover many times over the past few thousand years, it will not be able to do so this time around. It will not be able to recover because the material base that allowed it to exist over the past few thousand years is simply no longer there. Trying to disprove that this is the case solely by pointing out the similarity between the narrative used here and the narrative of the apocalyptic Christian bunch is nothing but a rhetorical trick. If you want to prove that civilization will again rise from the ashes, the way it did so many times in the past, then you have to prove that, contrary to the arguments put forth by the primitivists, the material base required by civilization is in fact still here. Or if you cannot prove this conclusively, then at the very least, you need to be able to show that there is a semi-reasonable chance that this base is still here. I do not recall seeing this kind of argument made convincingly on JMG’s blog, despite the fact that I have been reading it each week for many months now.
Further, I have some serious problems with what JMG says in the thread on his blog that started all of this:
[quote]But there’s a broader issue as well. The point of The Archdruid Report is the centrality of myth and narrative in the way we construct our future. When Jason (or Lorenbliss, or Hardleft, or any of a dozen other examples) proposes yet another rehash of classic apocalypticism — which is what all of them are doing — to my mind the important point is the narrative they’ve chosen. Of course they can find facts to back up their convictions, and I could do the same if I wanted to play that game; for every fact, as some wag pointed out, there’s an equal and opposite fact.[/quote]
To be sure, the narratives that we choose do influence our collective future, but these narratives are not chosen randomly. To say that “for every fact, there’s an equal and opposite fact� is to deny that we are physical beings living under concrete material conditions, and to pretend that we are instead pure spirits with whom those facts that contradict their preferred narratives will never catch up. It’s to pretend that we choose our narratives in a vacuum, which is of course complete nonsense. You want to convince me that your narrative makes more sense than someone else’s? All right. Then show me how your narrative makes better sense of the facts that the other person’s; show me how your narrative, under these particular circumstances, is more productive than the other person’s; and (perhaps most importantly), either show me that the facts that the other person chooses to emphasize do not hold up to scrutiny, or else show me how your narrative deals with them and integrates them. If you don’t want to (or aren’t able to) do these things, then all this talk about the narrative exists only in la-la land.
Comment by Hasha — 30 May 2007 @ 5:59 PM
Jason, I’ve been an innocent bystander until now, but you keep repeating this thing about the “new lease” that Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World gave to Western civilization through expansion of available arable land , and this calls for an answer from a European perspective, because it’s overly simplistic.
In fact, 1492 did not change anything about the pattern of famine and endemic war that characterized Europe in the Late Middle Ages. Emigration to the Americas was marginal until the late 19th century, escpecially from countries like Germany, Italy, Poland or Russia that had not colonies of their own, but later on constitued the majority of the emigrants. The silver bullion that flooded Spain only allowed them to buy food from elsewhere in Europe, not from the Americas or Asia. And periodical die-off continued: The 30 Years War e.g. is not widely known in the US because you often see European history through the eyes of the British, who had no role in that war and consequently ignore it, but according to some estimates it reduced the population of what was then Germany by one third or possibly two thirds.
What really allowed European population to rise in the Early Modern Age and onwards was technological progress: improved agricultural techniques like four-field crop rotation, use of the horse as draft animal, better grafting methods etc., plus new crops from the Americas like potatoes (the impact of the latter shouldn’t be overestimated, though, as most new crops were not widely used before the late 18th century, cf. Jefferson’s dwarfish Frechmen). And it was only in the late 19th century that this technological progress was not enough anymore to feed the rising number of people, and it is not before that time they really start getting on the boat in large numbers. The German fertility rate was 5 children per woman around 1880, and while Europeans tried all they could to maintain soil fertility with Chilean or South Sea bird shit, there were simply too many people. But that was only then, not immediately following 1492, and it might be argued that the 19th century was a race of technology against technology - better medicine (=fewer deaths) against better agricultural methods, and medicine scored an impressive victory because conventional agriculture had already reached its absolute limit.
This does not totally invalidate your argument, of course, but please bear in mind that writers like Manning or Brown sometimes paint their picture with extremely broad brushstrokes.
Rgds
Bernd
Comment by Bernd Ohm — 30 May 2007 @ 6:12 PM
John Michael is not now and never has been interested in open and honest debate. I watched him delete comments by me in just about every post he makes (including several today) as I’ve tried to engage him and challenge his views.
John Michael wants and has a bully pulpit from which to pontificate (pretty much literally) about the impending collapse and to gleefully write about all of the horrible things involved in it.
I went to college with John Michael and we were once good friends until his need to control an organization trumped friendship between us and a number of others as well (he walked away from all of us though really it was more of a shoving away). I mention this to say that I knew him quite well for over five years and spent a lot of face time with him.
He’s never felt at home in modern culture, going at great lengths to discuss how he would have been well fit for an earlier era than today. His love of discussing collapse and its implications come from this place and his general dislike (or outright hatred for all that I know at this point) of civilization and a fantasy vision of a post-apocalyptic age. It is the same point of origin as his druidism and other esoteric fantasies.
I’m much more interested, as some here may remember, in trying to do something to improve the current world and avoiding a collapse than just writing off the world and fantasizing about it being replaced, mostly because of the sheer scale of suffering and death involved in any collapse situation.
Comment by Al Billings — 31 May 2007 @ 12:06 AM
Are certain kinds of posts here filtered out? I just tried posting something twice and it didn’t go through.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 12:24 AM
There is probably a default spam-sensing filter in play.
Comment by Al Billings — 31 May 2007 @ 12:45 AM
Primitivism, then, is not apocalyptic. It promises only an indiscriminate scourging of the species, followed by a long, agonizing ecological implosion that won’t stop until the planet has been completely sterilized by an aging sun. There is no future for primitivism — both figuratively (given its closed, cyclical cosmology) and literally (given its technical incapacity to escape this vulnerable planet). No future equals no hope. I hate to toss out such a loaded word as nihilism, but Anthropik reeks of a highly academic form of it.
Nonsense. It merely postpones the inevitable and final crash. No amount of simplification can forestall the death of the biosphere, confined as it is to this one planet. Gaea is mortal, and if her children won’t exit the womb for fear of the wider universe, they will perish with her. Your philosophy offers no hope whatsoever, other than the false hope of “sustainability”, which is a word that is only meaningful when qualified with a time frame.
But the world you foresee is not better, merely different. And for the billions who won’t see it, it is as uninspiring as the singulitarian fantasies at which you sneer. There is nothing in these pages to recommend primitivism to me: it is a philosophy of fear and death, prettified with green language and backed by a retrograde metaphysics. You mine the mechanistic, reductionist science of (Western) civilization — with its dismal forecast of universal heat death — to posit a vital, spirit-filled cosmos, and I can only call bullshit. The conclusion does not follow from the premises. If the universe is a clock that is slowly winding down to oblivion, then we’re screwed no matter how we live. The decision to advocate a primitive lifeway under such circumstances can have no moral basis; it boils down to an aesthetic preference. (As an aside, is not your fixation on recovering the lost heritage of mankind a form of anthropocentrism? What, after all, is so special about humanity? If we’re just one small clump of tissue in the vast organism of the planet, why should it matter if we suffer? Millions of sperm die to fertilize one egg. Is the “suffering” of the sperm an abomination, or a necessary part of procreation?) If it is not, if the universe is one vast ecological system that transcends the merely biological, then the only constraints we face are those we impose on ourselves in choosing our horizons. You choose only to see this one planet; therefore, you invite extinction.
Comment by Robert — 31 May 2007 @ 4:18 AM
First of all, it’s not indiscriminate: anyone relying on civilization will get caught up in its collapse. But if you live outside of civilization, relying only on your own subsistence methods, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t survive. The ecological impact will lessen as civilization grows weaker, and the last areas of the map to close will be the first to open.
Second of all, where’s this “ecological implosion”? Why on earth would our ecology continue to get worse and worse after the thing that’s destroying it went away? We’ve repeatedly argued that there will be an explosion of new life forms to replace the old ones we drove to extinction, and the earth will find a new balance very soon after collapse. See: The Fifth World.
As for this whole “aging sun” thing that I’m getting really sick of hearing from everyone… is there any subsistence method, form of government, etc., that will ensure humanity immortality? And don’t say civilization, because it’s already crashing after only 10,000 years, having given humans nothing but a little day-trip to the moon. All we have beyond that is just theoretical possibility. Not only don’t we have the resources to get us off this planet (and since we’ve already maxxed out this planet’s resources, we never will), we don’t have the technology and we can’t figure out how to make it. And that’s not even taking into account the terraforming efforts we’d need to throw into whatever other planet we land on - or what we’ll do when that planet goes kaplooie. I mean, shit, we can’t even get ourselves off this rock.
At some point, you have to accept that planets die, species die, and you know what? If humans last long enough to see the sun engulfing the earth, that’s a hell of a long life span for any species. This is the whole point of living in the hands of the gods that agriculture resists: death is the way of the universe, and to fight it is narcissistic, selfish, short-sighted, and ultimately impossible. Go watch The Fountain.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 31 May 2007 @ 8:48 AM
Ah, yes, my old foe Askimet…
Go Giuli!
Comment by jhereg — 31 May 2007 @ 8:55 AM
It was actually Catton who outlined this; see “The Age of Exuberance.” Yes, famines and wars continued, but where civilization had previously been on the brink of collapse, post-Columbus, the European empires began to form, using trade with New World colonies to undergo new phases of growth. Immigration was marginal, but it wasn’t people in the New World themselves that brought this new bout of prosperity, it was the imports brought back from the New World, including New World crops like tomatoes, corn, and potatoes that forever changed European life. The horse-drawn plow had a huge impact as well, and European societies continued to ride closer to the line with more people living more meager lives, but the New World colonies demonstrably allowed for significantly more people. And as you noted, when that began to fail, large-scale migration to the New World followed.
Al, I read one of your comments before it was deleted, and it did seem fairly insulting to me, at least. That may be the product of your past relationship, too, but that’s obviously something I’m in no position to judge. I really don’t want to spend this thread on Greer personally, though, I don’t think that’s appropriate.
I still hold that if there is a way to avoid collapse, then it must lie in permaculture, primitive skills, rewilding, localization, bioregionalism, animism and similar trends coming to the forefront rapidly enough to allow a gradual deflation of civilization. I doubt such a thing is possible, but there’s the beauty of it: this is probably the most effective thing that can be done to avoid a collapse, and it’s also the very best thing to do to preserve as much life as possible in the case that that fails.
Of course, neither should we forget that all the horrors of collapse are not a future possibility, but for most humans alive today, and for the whole non-human world, a very present reality. Two hundred species go extinct every single day, and the suffering required of the Third World so that the First World can continue is horrific. All collapse means is that the First World would have to endure the same fate it’s so long afflicted upon everyone and everything else—with the exception, of course, that collapse ends.
Akismet. You’d be buried in a thousand spam comments a day without it (literally), but it does get overzealous sometimes and makes some false positives. It makes more false negatives, but it at least keeps the number low enough to prune by hand. Did your post have a lot of links in it? That sometimes can make it think it’s spam. I’m afraid I couldn’t find it in the filter, though; I can usually rescue such messages, but it must’ve gotten pushed too far back. It was reporting over a thousand spam messages caught last night, and it would only show me the first few hundred. Sorry.
Robert, I’m afraid I can’t find any way to describe your viewpoint but “insane.” If you’re not immortal, then there is no hope? That kind of absolutism is the very root of nihilism. Organisms live and die; so do species, planets, stars, galaxies and even universes. Either this universe will one day expand so far and grow so cold that no life is possible, or it will crunch back in on itself one day and bring the universe to an end that parallels its beginning. Even if we go colonizing other worlds, that remains inescapable.
But of course, the earth is part of who we are. Ecopsychologists have shown us how dehumanized we become separated from the living earth, how we lose something intrinsic to our humanity. If we could “escape” our planet, we would escape our humanity with it. Is it worth continuing our species biologically, at the cost of our humanity?
And ultimately, what about you, personally? One day, you are going to die. You are an animal, and that means that your life is given to you, as a gift, by a thousand heroic sacrifices, as plants and animals and fungi lay down their lives for you, all in the sacred vow that one day, you will do the same. Animal life is justified only by its obligation to give back more than it takes, and to one day lay down its life for the land that birthed it, mingle in the soil, and become the life of a new generation. This is why our literature always reckons those who pursue immortality as villains; their ambition is to take without ever giving back, and to betray the sacred vow you made to every living thing that ever gave its life for you. An immortal plant might be a very different story, but for humans, the pursuit of immortality is a villainous betrayal greater than any other.
The absolutism to suggest that hope is meaningless unless it lasts forever is nothing short of insanity. Nothing lasts forever, not even the universe itself. Immortality is the dream of insane villains. Leaving the earth behind would only rob us of our humanity. But what of the hope for a good death at the end of a happy life? What about the ambition to be part of the living world again, to live in the wonder of a more-than-human world, to experience the full joy of what it means to be human, and at the end of that time, to die, and to see what life is like as blades of grass, as a tree, as insects and birds, and perhaps one day, a human again?
But the insanity your post outlines so well, Robert, is essentially the insanity that civilization itself is founded on: an irrational, immature terror at the thought of mortality that arises from a severely limited sense of self anchored solely in the conscious ego. It can be understandable to fear death if one has lived life in such a limited way; after leading a quarter of a life, who would be willing to give it up? Of course, the answer to that is hardly immortality, but to lead a truly human life in the first place.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 10:08 AM
We really need to learn to accept death in this culture. Not only for reasons that Jason and Giuli have outlined, but also for our own sake. In fact, I just finished a book on the topic - Western Attitudes toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present by Philippe Aries - which I strongly recommend. It used to be, not so long ago (as late as the 19th, and in some places well into the 20th century) that death was perceived as a normal, inevitable part of life. Death was a big ritual in which the dying person was surrounded by family and friends, in which s/he got to say goodbye to everyone, in which s/he could share his/her last wishes… A person was expected to be the first one to sense his/her coming death; in case this didn’t happen, others were expected to warn the person that his/her death was nigh. Not so anymore. We now imagine that death doesn’t exist. Sure, we know abstractly that one day we will have to die, but we don’t feel it in our bones. And when the time comes… We are deprived of our own deaths. We are not supposed to show that we know we are about to die, even when this is patently obvious. We die alone, in a hospital, plugged onto machines, humiliated and as if exiled. As a price of our denial of death, we end up getting robbed of this major existential experience, the rite of passage that is our death. And it isn’t just the last few hours/days of our lives either. Because we see death as the enemy, people’s lives sometimes end up getting artificially prolonged by months or even years: years of suffering that would’ve been avoided had they been allowed to die on their own time. I’ve watched this play out with my own grandmother, and it was awful. One of my comforts in the face of peak oil was that it pretty much guaranteed that this would not happen to me. When my time comes, these infernal machines that they plug you onto in order to prevent you from dying on your own time are simply not going to be around for me.
As for this business about the death of Sun… I couldn’t agree with Giuli and Jason more. And furthermore, when people start justifying civilization as our only hope for surviving the death of the Sun, my reaction is: so you are going to kill us right now in order to avoid our being killed more than a billion of years from now? Because that’s what civilization (especially, though by no means exclusively, the industrial civilization) is doing. It is killing the planet and therefore humans right now. And if its ravaging doesn’t stop sometime really soon, then I can assure you that we have no reason whatsoever to worry about the death of the Sun, and this for the simple reason that we’ll be gone long, long before that, and due to causes that are of our own making.
Comment by Hasha — 31 May 2007 @ 11:36 AM
Insulting is in the eye of the beholder. When someone pretends to take a high moral position but it is really built on sand and negative intentions, I am going to call them on it if I feel a reason to…
JMG isn’t interested in true discussion. The conversations that happen here, both pro and con, are never allowed to occur on his blog.
Comment by Al Billings — 31 May 2007 @ 12:30 PM
It is, but I can see some reason in that particular deletion. As you say, it’s arguable; I’ve allowed more insulting messages to stand here, but I have a much lighter moderator’s touch (some say too light). Whether or not JMG is interested in true discussion, as much as my anger inspires me to jump in and join you, I don’t think is a very appropriate discussion here. I’m really pissed about what JMG pulled, so it’s rather difficult to counter what you’re saying, but I don’t want this to be a “bashing JMG” thread, I just want the chance to answer the points made against me in a thread I was not allowed to answer.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 12:39 PM
Hey, that’s life in the civilized lane, I guess.
My post contained a link to JMG’s most recent attempt at fiction in which a bunch of hunter-gatherer wanna-be’s end up meeting an unfortunate fate (at least as part of the background story), more likely than not at the hands of some hungry cougars. I was attempting some wry humor over the fact that I foresaw him doing so last week, and my post in addition to the link contained a certain word starting with “p” that I’m sure attracts the attention of spam filters.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 12:56 PM
Perhaps that would be better rendered at the paws of some hungry cougars.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 1:00 PM
Thanks to Chiggles, who had a copy of the page queued up and emailed me the original comment that JMG deleted. I’ve edited the post to include it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 1:02 PM
Oh, indeed it does. “Adam’s Story: Twilight in Learyville” does show a good bit of ignorance of what primitivism is about, but I suppose if people were taking off en masse and in such an ignorant state that they’d stop for a last restaurant meal before heading out, they probably would all end up dead.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 1:04 PM
Cynical as I am, I wouldn’t be surprised if JMG is right about how many dumb youngsters might end up as “Meow-Mix” because they thought reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael was all the preparation they needed for heading out into the woods to “re-wild”.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 1:26 PM
It’s certainly possible—it happened to Christopher McCandless, providing Jon Krakauer’s cautionary tale for Into the Wild. But that’s a volume you’ll often find on primitivist reading list, precisely for that warning. JMG’s story says:
If life were really so brutal, the human race would not have survived long enough to invent agriculture. The living world does welcome you with open arms, but it also tests you and every other thing that wants to live, to make sure you’re worth your share of the abundance, and that means knowing how to survive. Hunting, fishing, hiking, these are things most of us do for recreation; they’re a hunter-gatherer’s “work.” But you absolutely do have to know what you’re doing, and you can’t do it alone.
I don’t hear a lot of primitivists saying to just run off in the woods as you are. I do hear a lot about rewilding, about learning primitive skills, and about reconciling your relationship with your land. I do wish I heard more about the importance of community in that, and the social skills to create a strong community, but the kids in this story aren’t following any primitivist I’ve ever heard of, or the example of any existing primitive people. They’re following some caricature of primitivism that seems invented by someone whose willingness to listen to the idea does not equal his will to condemn it. Hmm.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 2:04 PM
Or failing that, go jump in it.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 3:20 PM
Also, it’s a shame about McCandless. With more knowledge and common sense and with far less foolhardiness, he could have matured into an renowned exemplar and philosopher of anarcho-primitivism. I note he died the year Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael was published.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 May 2007 @ 6:30 PM
Indeed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 8:14 PM
I have attempted several times to post replies here, and each time I receive some bogus message telling me why I can’t. Either the post is flagged as a duplicate (utter bunk, since the original never appeared, either), or I’m told I have to wait 15 seconds between posts, despite the fact that I’ve waited 5-10 minutes. If you don’t want dissension on your site, censor the offending posts like Greer did. But don’t hide behind your spam filter.
Comment by Robert — 31 May 2007 @ 10:15 PM
Robert, you’re being ridiculous. The situation is that most comments are instantly posted and a few comments are not posted at all (as opposed to being posted, then deleted later). How could we possibly have control over that? Do you think we lurk silently over the site, waiting for a dissenter to make a post, read the entire comment, determine it to be disagreeable, and stop it from being posted, all in the span of a single millisecond? Um, no.
Now, if we moderated comments, approving or disapproving them before they went up, and your comments never went up while others posted shortly before and after yours did, then you’d have a case. Or if you saw your post go up and then mysteriously dissappear—again, then you’d have a case. But there’s just no program you can write that will recognize opinions contrary to the designer’s and then really subtly stop them from being posted. Seriously, stop being paranoid. You got caught in the spam filter. Just like venuspluto67 did before you. Speaking of which, VP67, did you say anything you think we’d deem “dissent”?
If you want some examples of our draconian moderation policies that apparently work faster than the speed of light, I recommend checking out some of our longer threads to see far more insulting commenters than you go on for pages at a time about how much they hate Jason personally.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 31 May 2007 @ 10:44 PM
Yeah, Robert, that’d require some fairly superhuman feats on our part. And it’s standard WordPress behavior, so you’re not really helping the perception that you’re crazy here. Did your post happen to have a lot of links? Did you happen to mention some hot new painkiller at low, low prices? Akismet gets overzealous, and this is what happens. Hell, it’s done it to me before. Now, there’s been over 150 spam posts since yours got caught, so I’m afraid it’s fallen off the edge of the world as it were. I apologize for that. Try writing it again, and pay attention to how “spammy” it sounds: a URL is more “spammy” than a hyperlink; “Click here” is usually a red flag; link density per words could hurt you, too. I know it’s annoying, and Akismet’s been making a lot of mistakes the past few days (it gets tempermental sometimes), but you wouldn’t want to see what this place would look like without it. After all, we got over 150 spam posts since you tried to post.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 10:56 PM
No, Giulianna, I am not being ridiculous. If you set your filters so strictly as to eliminate most posts from first-time or infrequent users, then you establish a bias in favor of long-time posters, who are more likely to be sympathetic to your theses. In other words, you raise the cost of entry into the conversation for newcomers who already expect resistance due to the variance of their ideas. Most people would give up in the face of such an obvious “Keep Out” sign, but when you combine an overly zealous filter with a thread that is in part a rebuke of censorship, some folks might get just a little bit pissed and call you on it. I don’t like spam, but I’m willing to tolerate a bit of clutter to ensure the debate isn’t short-circuited by a twitchy piece of software.
Comment by Robert — 31 May 2007 @ 11:15 PM
Robert, did you read that part about “a thousand spam comments a day without it (literally)”? Yeah it’s shitty, but to me it’s worthwhile to attempt posting a comment numerous times, instead of reading through innumerable amounts of spam, which I’d say would definitely make it more difficult to engage in conversation here than having the occasional comment not post, personal preferences being what they are.
Comment by chiggles — 31 May 2007 @ 11:26 PM
It’s called Akismet. It’s a standard issue spam filter for WordPress, and it doesn’t allow much room for personal modification. It creates a Bayesian network formed from the total pool of all Akismet users, which is essentially all WordPress users, so it’s a social networking approach to spam filtering. So it doesn’t provide any favor for regulars over new posters. You’ve posted here before, after all, and it didn’t stop you. Venuspluto posts regularly, and but she got caught in it. I get caught in it, too. So it doesn’t raise the cost of entry at all.
Some clutter does get through, and I hand-prune that myself. We get a few dozen false negatives a day, and maybe a few dozen false positives every few months. Of course, posting the same message that was previously caught will likely get caught again. All in all, it’s about as much as you can ask of a spam filter.
Here’s from the Anthropik configuration page:
I actually turned that up from the default to make it more lenient, and that’s about all the configuration I can make to Akismet. So, yeah, you kind of are being ridiculous.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 May 2007 @ 11:27 PM
Robert, when I try to post on this blog, I frequently get this weird message that tells me that I can post only every 15 seconds (even if I hadn’t posted at all that day) and ‘Slow down, cowboy.’ I’ve gotten used to that. All it usually takes is to press the ‘back’ button on my browser and then the ‘post’ button again, and my message goes through just fine. It’s not censorship - it’s just the imperfect software.
Comment by Hasha — 31 May 2007 @ 11:32 PM
I’m crazy because you interpreted my objection to mean I believe you’re lurking at your computer 24/7 to quash dissenters at the speed of light? W-T-F, mate?
If the precautions you must take against spam are such that they make posting legitimate messages a crap shoot, then maybe you should set up some kind of registration process and require people to log in before they post. Yeah, that won’t eliminate the spam either, but you can at least intercept the bots during registration and delete the posts from human spammers who go to the trouble of signing up and posting manually.
No and no.
In three failed posts, I included only two links. And they weren’t especially short posts, so link density should not have been an issue.
Fair enough. But it sends up red flags when responses to a post prompted by an act of censorship are themselves blocked, for whatever reason. Fortunately, it looks like my posts are getting through now, so I can try again. But if I wasn’t a stubborn coot, I’d probably have given up. How many people have walked away from here because the trouble of posting was too great?
Comment by Robert — 31 May 2007 @ 11:43 PM
You’re right, Jason. I failed digital clairvoyance in high school, and therefore was unable to divine the inner workings of Akimset. I’m an inveterate screwup.
Comment by Robert — 31 May 2007 @ 11:49 PM
No… I was the one who said that. And I’d like to hear some other explanation of how we could censor you post before you even posted it. Either we move faster than the speed of light or we can read minds and figure out if we don’t like your post while it’s still in your head.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 12:04 AM
No, you’re mostly crazy for the whole “living forever” thing you’re always harping on. That your scenario requires such superhuman feats on our part just adds fuel to that fire.
Now that would raise th cost of entry, significantly. This problem happens, but it’s a tiny minority of cases. We’ve now posted more comments talking about the phenomenon than have actually occured over the past year.
Yup, it’s a problem with WordPress. You’ll get it on any WordPress blog.
I’ve never recovered a message from someone who doesn’t post here regularly, and I do catch most of them out of the filter when it happens. So, while that’s an impossible number to reliably know, it can hardly be a large one.
It’s easy enough information to look up, but technical ignorance in itself is not a problem. To flip out as you did based on that ignorance is something else entirely. Not knowing something is fine; making accusations like yours because you couldn’t be bothered to look into it, that’s where you lose it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 12:07 AM
Strawman. I don’t “harp” on anything. I barely post here at all. I also don’t believe in personal immortality. We all gotta go sometime. (If we invented biological immortality tomorrow, we’d all still be dead in a few centuries from unavoidable accidents.) But life as a whole doesn’t, thanks to the miracle of procreation. It’s true you can’t have birth without death, but neither can you have death without birth. They’re complementary opposites locked in an agonistic relationship. If the biosphere expires because we didn’t do our best to export it elsewhere, birth and death will cease. There will be nothing left but bare rock and burning sand, and the whole exercise will have been a pointless diversion. Call it what you will, but I will call a fig a fig; a spade a spade; and nihilism, nihilism.
I was supposed to know beforehand that it was Akimset I was encountering and should therefore have been researching? Not everyone makes their living as a programmer, Jason, and I am not an oracle.
Oh, please. You’ll grasp at any excuse to dismiss a detractor. I got pissed because I am human, and being repeatedly frustrated in my efforts to post provoked me. I don’t expect to be well-received here, but the condescension emanating from your side of the screen never ceases to amaze me. And you don’t just do it here. I’ve seen you browbeat people on a half dozen other blogs and forums, from Pop Occulture to The Archdruid Report. That is largely why I don’t bother posting here very often, because I know you’ll just wade in with an ad hominem (e.g., you’re crazy) and then start reciting your litany of collapse. The only thing that keeps drawing me back is the irrepressible desire to contest pernicious ideas.
Comment by Robert — 1 June 2007 @ 1:11 AM
No. I pretty much described the post in the message that did get through.
“She”? Hmm. I’m wondering if at some point I gave an indication of to which gender I am attracted and assumptions were made about the gender of the person making the comment. It’s okay, I’m used to it by now.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 1 June 2007 @ 1:55 AM
Robert, dude. (Definitely a guy’s name, so I trust I’m not making assumptions here.) Seriously, read the “Radder Than Thou” thread. A lot of moderators would have banned Captain Tiresome pretty early on. (He came close to getting banned but upon being informed of this banned himself. We were all heartbroken, of course.)
Comment by venuspluto67 — 1 June 2007 @ 1:58 AM
Metal can be recovered from waste ore by microbial leaching. Reduced-tech societies could irrigate scrap heaps to recover dissolved metal. In many ways, the process is superior to smelting because it relies on the action of naturally occurring bacteria; can extract metal from low-quality ores; and requires few energy inputs, the chemical reactions themselves powering the bulk of the process.
Comment by Robert — 1 June 2007 @ 3:14 AM
Doctor Awesome was an ass from the start. He was either trying to illustrate Jason’s point in an absurdist fashion (and managing only to appear spiteful), or he was looking for a fight. I was irked by a glitch that blocked me from posting to a thread prompted by an act of censorship, which triggered my hypocrisy alarm. Instead of allowing me to vent in a single, heated post and then explaining the error once I’d recovered my cool, Giulianna and Jason insinuated that I’m nuts for not being familiar with the occult workings of their website. (Jason also called me crazy for supposedly wanting to live forever — a complete non sequitur.) But whatever. Dude.
Comment by Robert — 1 June 2007 @ 4:18 AM
What hypocrisy? There’s no physical way we could have ever consciously stopped you from posting something we didn’t like! There’s a difference between a computer glitch and censorship. Okay, yeah, it’s frustrating and I’ve often lost some really good comments to the same glitch, but that’s no reason to yell at us.
Goddamn, now you’re just grasping at any straw you can to justify being mad at us. First it was censorship, then we must have rigged the spam filter to be biased against new users, and now you’re pissed at us for not doing something we actually did.
This wasn’t enough venting for a “single, heated post”? First of all, how did we not “allow” you to post that comment? Second of all, we did explain the error—here and here, about half an hour after you “vented” in your “single, heated post.” I’m sorry if half an hour wasn’t long enough for you to recover your cool, but we’re not your therapists—we’re bloggers. We don’t know how long it takes for you to “recover your cool” after getting blocked by a computer glitch. For me, half an hour is usually more than enough, even if I lost a really long, well-written post that I worked hard on.
Also, I never insinuated you were nuts—I flat-out said you were being ridiculous. And it has nothing to do with the “occult workings of this website,” nevermind the fact that all WordPress blogs work just like this. This is just common sense: you can’t know what a post is going to say before it’s posted. Therefore, you can’t block it from being posted for disagreeing with you. This isn’t something unique to Anthropik, or WordPress—this is the way every site on the Internet works. No web admin anywhere has the power to see what someone’s typing into that little box until they’ve pressed “Post.”
These kinds of glitches annoy us all, but most of us don’t usually flip out at the admins, accusing them of censorship. Just open up a Notepad file next to your browser window, copy and paste, and try again.
Not necessarily. I was actually wondering how to refer to you in a post up there, and I ended up thinking, “Well, the handle begins with ‘venus,’ so maybe female?” Stupid logic, I know, but this is the Internet.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 8:37 AM
This is really funny—my last post got sucked into the spam filter too. Thankfully, I got to the spamrolls fast enough to catch it. Although if I hadn’t, I’d also copied and pasted the whole thing into a Notepad file, so it would still have been cool. See how easy this is?
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 8:40 AM
Very informative article…A common vision for reality we do not have–most of the responses that end in debates represent this basic fact.
I suggest picking up an old copy of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus & Goldmund and heading out near a comfy tree to read for a bit.
I wonder are people really getting that angry over spam filters, if so that type of passion is something that could definitely be used to do something great…or maybe just add to the ‘road-rage’ incidents who knows? Better get all your planting done, time’s a wasting.
Comment by Bubba — 1 June 2007 @ 9:58 AM
Fwiw, I don’t post often at all, and I’ve never been caught by the spam filter
Comment by Vicky — 1 June 2007 @ 10:23 AM
As far as the Great Spam Filter Censorship Flap of 2007 goes, to employ another of my favorite Sports Night quotes, “At this point, the length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it.”
That is true, but if I do a quick check on all the comments from your IP address, I get twelve total comments, of which three were on this notion of how we have to get off the earth, and eight are in this thread. So, immortality and our spam filter make up the topics for nearly all of your comments on this site.
OK, so you can see how hope works in a single human life even without individual immortality. A single life isn’t “a meaningless diversion” simply because it ends. Now, take that one step further and you’ll see why we keep calling you crazy.
I’m sorry, it’s the “Venus” part. When your name leads off with the goddess of femininity, it leaves an impression of gender.
That’s all true, but it doesn’t answer the basic question of scale. It’s still a lower-grade ore, yielding less metal per weight unit of ore than the ore we mine out of the ground. That increases your cost per tool, and decreases the scale at which you can spread these metal tools. I have no doubt that people will be using iron tools in five hundred years, but they’ll be rare and wondrous things, nearly magical, and blacksmiths who know how to work it will possess a rare and powerful knowledge on par with that of a sorcerer. Rather like it was in early Norse society, for instance. At those levels, metal tools have very little effect on society, because feasibility isn’t enough, you also need scalability.
No, I said you’re crazy for wanting to live forever; hardly a non-sequitur, since your case is that life is meaningless unless it lasts forever. If death doesn’t invalidate individual life, then extinction doesn’t invalidate a species’ existence. That’s hardly a non sequitur. That’s the part that makes you crazy, the whole cackling villain plotting to live forever routine. Flying off the handle because you got caught in a spam filter simply reinforces that notion, or as I said, “you’re not really helping the perception that you’re crazy here.” It’s not why we think you’re crazy, but it certainly corroborates the impression.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 10:26 AM
This sounds like an easy way to poison your water supply.
Comment by locke — 1 June 2007 @ 12:50 PM
Which is another reason to prefer bog iron, which would probably be a better source of iron than low-quality ores. Bog iron is actually organic and renewable, created from bacteria in swamps that collect iron during their lives, and then deposit it over time as they die. But this also limits the amount of iron. Again, if you want to see what a society relying principally on bog iron looks like, see the early Norse. This was part of why iron tools and weapons were so rare and valuable. The more popularly known “Vikings” came later, as they discovered they could trade with (and later, raid) areas with more abundant iron mines with higher quality ores to get the precious stuff. The Vikings considered themselves principally farmers, and secondarily traders. It was others who saw their lifestyle as primarily revolving around raiding and piracy. They certainly did, but it wasn’t their chief mode of interaction.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 1:03 PM
Blimey.
*And then I read the comments*
Blimey!
Jason,
Do you think your post on JMG’s website might have been deleted because he kept thinking he’d had the last word and you kept coming back for more until he LOST THE VERY WILL TO LIVE?
More of a skirmisher, myself, but I’ve got to admire the attrition warfare approach to internet discussion.
With that in mind, I’m going to limit myself to a single query by proxy:
“Rice was the cereal grain of choice, and rice agriculture is an incredibly labor-intensive form of farming. First, the rice paddy is flooded, then each rice plant must be planted by hand.”
I’ve just been reading Fukuoka’s The Road Back to Nature, and he disagrees with you on this. By planting old wilder strains of rice, first planting barley and only briefly flooding the field to weaken the barley and start the rice growing, he claims to have achieved yields matching those produced by industrial agriculture (when did he write it? late ’80s?). In addition, he suggests that, by planting clover a couple of weeks before harvest, you can allow the rice plants to re-seed themselves beneath the cover of the new clover seedlings, thus avoiding the need for all that back-breaking plant-by-plant peasantry business.
He also suggests that some of the rice farming in Japan prior to the C19th may have been similar to this approach, and hence not as unsustainable as some make it out to be.
So what? Um, dunno. Does this mean that rice can usefully form part of a permacultural lifestyle? That we can’t hold the rice responsible for the labour relations of ancient China but must rather look to a cultural imperative that determined the use of the crop in a specifically regimented and labour-intensive manner?
Just wondering…
Comment by cheeba — 1 June 2007 @ 1:29 PM
Well, he sort of disagrees. He fully agrees that traditional rice cultivation in paddies [b]is[/b] extremely labor intensive. On the other hand, he does claim results showing something on the order of 1300 lbs of grain a year from his quarter-acre rice and barley crops. I don’t really have any particular reason to doubt him. To be sure, this a comparable amount of rice/barley for the acreage to industrial methods. But, as I understand it, the ratio of “people power” to yield is also higher, this is one of the reasons why I don’t think it will scale as well as industrial methods. The other important contributor being that Fukuoka’s methods very time sensitive, you may only spend a few weeks a year tending to the grain crops, but when the little bit of work needs done, it’s got to be done, period. This means there’s a very real limit to how much acreage one person can maintain.
I don’t say this to denigrate the man’s work, tho’. What Fukuoka ends up with is extremely similar to permaculture. The greatest differences are in approach. Permaculture tends to approach things from more of a ‘top-down’ approach, whereas Fukuoka did it ‘bottom-up’. IMHO, there’s valuable things to learn from each method.
Comment by jhereg — 1 June 2007 @ 1:57 PM
Could be. I sometimes have that effect on people.
Fukoka doesn’t plant rice paddies, though.
What he does is very much in line with permaculture; it’s very low intensity, and focused on building up ecosystems, the opposite of agriculture’s trajectory. He doesn’t disagree with me so much as he’s talking about something very different. Read what he has to say about agriculture as it’s traditionally been done, and you’ll see him saying much the same thing. That’s why he started doing what he calls “natural farming.” Of course, I think that term’s confusing; who would look at one of Fukoka’s “farms” and recognize it as such? Permaculture gardens look like wilderness to untrained eyes. It’s much more revealing to call them “gardens,” and it’s much more in line with the images those words typically create. Otherwise, you’re sowing as much confusion as anything else.
I have no doubt, but he’s planting barley, and then rice. You can’t automate that kind of harvesting, and that means it has a hard time scaling. The production values are higher, just like other forms of horticulture give you greater yields per acre than agriculture, but they don’t scale up to feed cities. They require localized settlement patterns.
Some of it may well have been, just as many of the early settlers in the U.S. used some permacultural techniques. But the rising population and ecological toll evident through history shows that such trends were not the dominant ones. But I have no doubt they were there. Finding out what is salvageable from our past is an important project, and this is one part of it. But it also requires a very hard look at what parts of earlier life led them to constant growth and expansion, and what trends tried to counterbalance that.
Rice can probably be grown sustainably, but a sustainable society wouldn’t subsist just on rice. But to scale rice production up to feed cities, you need to enter into some very unsustainable practices. But, can we simply lay it at the feet of culture? Where did this sudden transformation of culture come from, if not the possibility to scale rice production up in ways that other plants could not? Such crops, where it is possible to produce them sustainably, or increase intensity to scale up just by growing the same crop unsustainably, create the Prisoner’s Dilemna that compels civilization to constant growth. The possibility is there, so the first one to seize it will dominate everyone who doesn’t.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 2:08 PM
Here’s something to consider when ruminating (no pun intended) over Fukuoka’s grain yields:
Comment by jhereg — 1 June 2007 @ 2:31 PM
Sorry Jason, But I have to disagree with you on the Megafaunal extinctions of Australia and the New World.It’s obvious that Humans overhunted through the use of clovis culture in the latter, and destroyed much of the habitat in Australia for the megafauna.
Comment by y'ello — 1 June 2007 @ 6:34 PM
Obvious?
Overkill, Overchill, and Human Nature
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 June 2007 @ 6:45 PM
Most of the megafauna extinctions in the Americas were already over before humans came to the Americas (20 out of 35 genera), and DNA evidence proves that bison populations were dwindling 15,000 years before humans showed up. We have evidence of Clovis hunting mammoths, but none of the other megafauna that went extinct. How can that be “obvious”?
Humans have an effect on their environment, absolutely. And like any alpha predator, that undoubtedly would have added some stress that might have tipped already borderline species into extinction. But the evidence is no greater than that of any other predator entering a new ecosystem; that includes the effects on islands, which are much smaller and thus much more delicate. Continents are larger, more complex and have more stabilizing feedback loops, which is why you can’t just assume the same dynamics on continents as on islands. It’s that oversimplification that’s the cornerstone of the “Overkill” theory.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 June 2007 @ 8:38 PM
I come back from work and what do I find…?
Sigh.
Giulianna, I had calmed down, and then you stoked the embers by saying my reaction was ridiculous. It was anger, and therefore irrational, but it was not unreasonable. (There was a reason for it, even if you cannot see it.) Shortly thereafter, Jason said I was crazy.
Um, right. That’s terribly creative. He annoys me, so he’s nuts. Now how can I justify the impulse to call him such? Whatever.
The fact of the matter is, you have no idea what else was going on at the time that could have fueled my reaction, and instead of just letting a trivial comment slide, you had to issue a rebuke. As if it were a compulsion. From everything I’ve witnessed of you two, you can’t not pass up an opportunity to explain to other people — often in excruciating detail — how wrong they are and how right you are.
This is why I don’t believe you will ever be able to build Anthropik into a viable tribe: you’re rigidly dogmatic (me right, you wrong, here’s a 10,000-word monograph demonstrating why), and your people-handling skills suck. So long as everything is nice and pleasant and folks are agreeable, you’re fine, but the moment there’s a little bit of tension, you start needling — and then act surprised and exasperated when you’re met with hostility. Well, that’s bullshit. It’s intellectual bullying, and you only get away with it because — as cheeba noted (and Jason apparently acknowledges) — you attrite your opponents with an avalanche of verbiage until they finally tire and walk away. Well, if half the people in your tribe walk away because they won’t be browbeaten for having a moment of human weakness and the other half are varying degrees of yes-men, then you no longer have a tribe, but a cult.
Good luck with that.
Comment by Robert — 2 June 2007 @ 1:38 AM
Not all reasons are reasonable.
No, lots of people annoy me. You’ve been telling us that if we don’t live forever, then existence is meaningless. That’s basically every deranged literary villain who ever cackled maniacally about his plan to live forever. That’s downright stereotypically crazy. Add world domination and stealing the love interest for the hat-trick.
You were calling me a hypocrite of a pretty high order. I’d say a rebuke is in order. What, we’re here to take your abuse? Whatever else might’ve been going on justified you taking it out on us? In what way does that make sense?
We like to hash out our differences. We enjoy intellectual debate. That’s why this website exists, so yes, you see a lot of that here. And we happen to know a lot of stuff, so when it comes to something we care about, we’ve got a lot of material to employ in that cause. Personally, I see that as a strength. You call it “rigidly dogmatic.” But the thing is, we don’t need people to agree with us to get along with them. Giuli & I disagree on plenty of things, and we disagree with Mike on still more. And, because we’re all smart and passionate, we like to discuss those matters. But most importantly, at the end of the day, we’re in this together, and whatever we disagree on just makes us stronger. Call that “rigidly dogmatic” if you like, but I don’t see it.
We do defend ourselves with an equal amount of force, yes. A mild, civil disagreement tends to stay mild and civil. Someone screaming at us about our morally bankrupt nihilism and vile hypocrisy, as you do, and you get a somewhat stronger reaction. Curl your mustache and cackle with some of the most classic villain’s plots of paperback sci-fi, and you wind up here.
Answering your responses, point by point, is intellectual bullying? I think what you were trying to say was something more along the lines of, “I got beat fair and square, I guess you were right.” But it’s OK if you have a hard time saying that, it never came easy to me the first dozen times or so. It gets easier. At this point, I say it every time it comes up. Of course, the more often you’re able to say that, the less often it comes up. Seems you can learn from people when you’re not too busy trying to fight them.
If someone doesn’t have the intelligence and passion to go toe-to-toe with us, then he’s not strong enough for us. That’s hardly a group of yes-men, though. What it’s gotten us so far are three people with very different views and more than enough force to stand behind them. What kind of cult is it where everyone’s the forceful leader and no one’s doing any following?
Face it, Robert, as far as this inane spam filter flap goes, you were just plain old in the wrong. You put a lot of nastiness into a stupid position. You now apparently recognize the position was stupid, which is a start, so it should follow naturally that the nastiness you put into was uncalled for, and the retaliatory response justified. For the love of all the gods, either just apologize and let it go, or even better, just let it go entirely. Even your insane ideas about immortality and life escaping the earth are worth discussion more than this.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 June 2007 @ 2:09 AM
See, Robert, it comes down to this—if I post a note about something I read somewhere, and it turns out to be wrong, that’s no big deal. I didn’t have a lot of investment in it, so if it’s wrong, it’s wrong. If I make a big scene, say, flying off the handle accusing someone of hypocrisy, and I turn out to be wrong, well, that’s a lot more significant. Because I’ve invested a lot more in it, so it reflects a lot more on me. To what degree someone is “in the wrong” is largely a question of how much force they made a wrong case with.
You were nasty. Really nasty. Nastier than anything we’ve had to say in response. And you were wrong. Really, really wrong. To pour that much bile into an argument you obviously, in hindsight, really had no basis or knowledge to make, is really, really bad.
So, the fact that we retaliated against nasty, unjustified libel with nastiness only slightly less than yours is something I have a really hard time fitting into the framework of your increasing rhetoric about our “intellectual bullying” and “bullshit” and our “cult.” We love a good discussion, but we’re not here for you to beat up on when you’re feeling angry or frustrated, so when you treat us like that, you can expect a good retaliation to remind you that that’s never an acceptable thing to do to anybody—and we, at least, won’t sit back and take it from you or anyone else.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 June 2007 @ 2:34 AM
Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!! Everyone, please. When is this censorship/spam filter debate going to end?
Comment by Hasha — 2 June 2007 @ 9:29 AM
Didn’t HITLER come up with the idea for spam filters????
Godwin invoked, thread over.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 2 June 2007 @ 11:49 PM
Most of the megafauna extinctions in the Americas were already over before humans came to the Americas (20 out of 35 genera), and DNA evidence proves that bison populations were dwindling 15,000 years before humans showed up.
We have evidence of humans entering the continent 65,000 years ago?Wouldn’t surprise me, but the dating at mesa verde and meadowcroft only go back 12,500 and 50,000 years ago respectively.
Are you still a “Clovis first” adherent?
Damn, that’s like seeing a Betamax!
Comment by y'ello — 3 June 2007 @ 12:27 AM
Meadowcroft is next door, so I was pre-Clovis before it was cool.
But here I was sticking to the same “traditional” dates as Grayson, to keep things simpler. Meadowcroft only goes back to 19kya. Buffalo populations were declining 42-32kya, still 23-13kya before Meadowcroft.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 June 2007 @ 10:44 AM
Yep. Twas only a small point really, but more interesting than talking about spam filters, so…
“Fukoka doesn’t plant rice paddies, though.
What he does is very much in line with permaculture;”
Yep. I see now you were specifically talking about rice AGRICULTURE.
“the rising population and ecological toll evident through history shows that such trends were not the dominant ones.”
Yep. Again. I also accept your (and jhereg’s) points about scalability. But I’m interested in the way that rice doesn’t _automatically_ work in quite the same way as grain agriculture elsewhere - in terms of method of cultivation, health impacts, susceptibility to diesease, environmental degradation etc.
“Where did this sudden transformation of culture come from, if not the possibility to scale rice production up in ways that other plants could not?”
Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? At this point I suspect we part theoretical company to some extent. I think the fact that we can point to numerous cultures that specifically don’t go down this route (indeed, through potlatch-style social mechanisms, specifically work to supress the possibility) suggests that something more than just the Prisoner’s Dilemma inevitability-of-growth business going on, at least in terms of the initial switch to Civilisation/Agriculture.
Specifically, I would argue for some kind of macroparasitic unit of warlike loons (/conquering nomads/ violent bandits) first initiating the switch to hierarchy and subsequently taking their place as a ruling class, who then force their subjects (physically and psychologically) to adopt unsustainable agricultural lifestyles in order to transfer surpus energy up the pyramid. I’m not convinced that primitive people ever have absolute freedom just to ‘walk away’ in such circumstances, but probably would be content to put up with a certain amount of occasional predation, until such time as the new circumstances begin to pollute their own cultural meme-pool and bring about a culture of subservience and psychological dysfunction.
This demands the further question, of course, of what made this parasitic group so evil in the first place. It seems to me that some kind of psycho-cultural event has to precede this aspect of the initial ‘fall’.
James DeMeo (in ‘Saharasia’) suggests that a climatic shift in the Saharan and Levantine regions 6000 years ago and the subsequent environmental shift towards desert conditions correlates well with the shift from matrist societies to what he calls ‘armoured patrist’, defined by a cluster of attributes including violence, hierarchy, intercourse taboos and infant trauma. Driven out of these regions in search of food, he suggests, this deep-seated dysfunctionality may have been the initial spark leading to the imposition of hierarchical and patriarchal social models on conquered tribes, which, of course, goes on to replicate the same damaging and disruptive memes across larger and larger populations.
But he’s into cloud-busting and stuff, so you might not be up for that. I haven’t really attempted to synthesise DeMeo into my own theories yet, but it’s an interesting line of inquiry. I guess my point is that the shift to agriculture is always going to have a cultural dimension rather than just being an inevitable function of the logic of growth, or else we need to ask why it didn’t happen 30,000 years earlier. We better hope culture plays a part, anyway, or else the prospects of people doing things differently disappear entirely. I’m not quite ready to give up on that one just yet…
Comment by cheeba — 3 June 2007 @ 1:00 PM
cheeba wrote:
‘Yep. Again. I also accept your (and jhereg’s) points about scalability. But I’m interested in the way that rice doesn’t _automatically_ work in quite the same way as grain agriculture elsewhere - in terms of method of cultivation, health impacts, susceptibility to diesease, environmental degradation etc.’
I don’t know if corn automatically operates the ‘agricultural’ way, for lack of a better term, either, since i think corn beans and squash made up the horticultural three sisters suite, rigt? it’s not necessarily monocropped.
i don’t have much else to add, though.
Comment by Archangel — 3 June 2007 @ 10:44 PM
From what I’ve managed to gather, I don’t think rice has any particular “edge” over other grains in a horticultural setting (except, perhaps in gluten content). Corn and other grains (note Fukuoka grew barley over the winter) seem to be equally viable. The absolute unquestionable issues are tilling & monocropping. I take Jason’s comments on the ’slippery slope’ of grain cultivation in general pretty seriously, however, I’m not 100% certain it’s accurate. I see the argument, and it’s unquestionably a strong one, but at an intuitive level there’s something about it that I’m having difficulty getting comfortable with. I’m not sure why.
Comment by jhereg — 4 June 2007 @ 9:08 AM
There’s really nothing special about cereal grains that makes them impossible to grow in a permacultural context: as already mentioned, corn is part of the Three Sisters guild, Fukoka provides an excellent start for rice, and I imagine even wheat could be well-integrated. Of course, the basic failure of these as human foods might be of some concern, but there’s nothing about these plants that requires them to be grown in an unsustainable context. They did, after all, evolve in a given ecological context and serve an ecological role. Specifically, their role lies in disaster recovery: they move in quickly, root in and set the soil for later plants. That means that cultivating cereal grains is simply mimicking disaster; the ecological impact of this on a large scale should not be difficult to imagine, particularly given the present example all around us.
That’s the danger of cereal grains, not that they must be grown unsustainably, but that they so easily can. Few crops scale up as readily as cereal grains, precisely because of their ecological niche. All you need to do is devastate more land to get a bigger harvest to feed more people. That possibility is sufficient to set off a positive feedback loop, as the first person to do so will outcompete all neighbors.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 June 2007 @ 11:27 AM
Hey –
hmmm… I think this is where you are losing people, J. Not that you haven’t drawn out the connection before, but just for refresher…
Before the prisoner’s dilemma becomes an issue, you need to have at least the beginnings of population boom, and heirarchy. Growing grains in a permaculture type context, by a small, (However, if the other pieces appear also… then the loop becomes not only possible, but likely.
Janene
Comment by janene — 4 June 2007 @ 12:50 PM
Need? I’m not sure; it might help, but is it necessary? We know that sedentism preceded agriculture in the Middle East, and we’ve got a good idea that it wasn’t the bad times that spurred agriculture, but the good times that followed the bad times, with the seed of fear planted and the resources to act on it. Then you have someone acting on that capacity to increase grain yield, in order to build up a surplus for the next bad time that comes around. So the normal sine wave of population becomes broken; the boom years still lead to population growth, but stores keep population from declining in the hard years. This first group to adopt that strategy has thus increased food production, and as a result, increased population. Of course, increased production leads to soil failure, and eventually the need for expansion—at which point they have the numbers to do so. Thus the cycle begins. Now, the beginning there is not a population boom or hierarchy, but a fearful community with the capacity using it to avoid the same fate in the future.
Taken more broadly, the Prisoner’s Dilemna becomes an issue as soon as the opportunity presents itself, ecologically. Then, each community knows that it can increase its production, and must decide whether they will maintan their so-far successful way of life, or do unto others before others do unto them. Eventually, one of those communities will go for it, and that’s really all it takes.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 June 2007 @ 1:30 PM
hi guys.
i’ve been following this discussion both here and at the Archdruid’s, and i’m glad to see that you both seem to be moving toward more common ground! you both have excellent sites, and much to share.
now that i am all caught up, i am left with one overriding thought at the moment:
with periodic famine/plague being such an integral part of most agricultural societies for thousands upon thousands of years, is it any wonder that we tend to carry that “apocalyptic narrative” around with us today?
maybe as a species, we recognize that particular “story” as a repeating *history* in our collective memories? and we still haven’t learned the lesson.
(as an aside, since you mention above your transformative two-day wild edibles class experience, and i assume that was at Raccoon Creek, i want to thank you two for turning me onto those folks! i’ve taken my 60 year old mum out there for some of those classes, and now she’s harping at my dad and the neighbors to let their lawns be taken over by dandelions and clover so she can eat them. maybe people *can* learn, after all!)
Comment by patricia — 4 June 2007 @ 8:56 PM
It was the Raccoon Creek classes, and that’s great! Does that mean we’ll see you at the Primitive Skills class next month?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 9:39 AM
Hey –
I think you expounded on *exactly* what I was getting at, J…. population rises initially occur not because of the dilemma, but as a result of material, unintentional factors. So if the pop goes up *and* you have the material ability to invest more into maintaining that increase, then someone will. Right? basic PD. But it is important to note that the initial swing in population was not caused by intent but rather by general environmental conditions (including hort)
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 June 2007 @ 11:04 AM
But in that example, the population rises after someone “takes the bait,” as it were. The population doesn’t rise, then setting off the race to see who’ll take advantage of the possibility first—the population rose because someone took advantage of the opportunity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 11:24 AM
Hey –
Did they? Or did population rise because the natural production of the local environment increased? Isn’t that your argument about the original population increases in mesopotamia?
The ‘takes the bait’ occurs the first time the population chooses NOT to accept scarcity, not the first time that the population expands….
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 June 2007 @ 12:03 PM
But that is the first time the population expands. If you start using food stores to cover you in hard times, and intensify production in good times, so that you’ll still experience growth but never experience decrease, then that’s a population expansion, and it occurs precisely because a community decides to rely more on cereal grains for food because they can be grown more intensely.
But of course, it won’t be just one community in this position, but several, and each one will know that they can grow a little more and have a little more for next year, if they’re just willing to plant a little more than they sustainably can. And because they know this, they’ll also know their neighbors will be in the same position—and they’ll become quite paranoid about what their rival neighbors might do if they take advantage of the opportunity first.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 12:12 PM
Hey –
Yes.
That’s exactly my point. The first thing that happens is the population grows. Then the Prisoner’s Dilemma kicks in, if and only if, the community has the ability to intensify.
This isn’t a disagreement, just a point of clarity for those looking for an answer to why some cultures end up in the loop and others don’t….
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 June 2007 @ 12:23 PM
I’m not following. First came the fear of what the other group might do, then came intensified production, and only then came the larger population.
I think the reason some groups end up in a loop while others don’t is a lot simpler than that—it’s just a matter of where the opportunity exists. It doesn’t always exist; it takes a very specific constellation of geographic and biological factors.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 12:28 PM
“Does that mean we’ll see you at the Primitive Skills class next month? ”
unfortunately, i keep not being able to attend that one because every year i have to go instead to the big national librarian hoo-ha conference, over that same weekend! it’s a requirement of my job. and you have to take the first level, before you can do the advanced class in the fall, i believe.
i did poke around some of the debris shelters that are up on that field there, when i took the folks up the other weekend for the pioneer demonstration encampment thing. no idea how long they’ve been up–couldn’t have been all the way from the advanced class *last fall* could it?! that would be amazing, if so.
Comment by patricia — 5 June 2007 @ 3:57 PM
Hey –
Back up a second. First comes higher carrying capacity and therefore higher population. Then comes all the rest as a response to declining conditions. Note: I’m talking about the ‘discovery’ of agriculture as opposed to later cultures using horticulture.
Janene
Comment by janene — 5 June 2007 @ 4:25 PM
Hmmmm. OK, let me try to wrap this all up … first came various methods for favoring the regrowth of your favorite plants, used by hunter-gatherers all over the world. In the Younger Dryas, Middle Eastern hunter-gatherers brought cereal grains into that fold. That led to sedentsm, and basically cereal grain horticulture, until the switch over to agriculture, which occurred as groups expanded the scale of cereal grain cultivation to an unsustainable level, tipping off the “Food Race” and the race to expand ahead of failing soils. I’m talking about that last transition—that one happens because of a Prisoner’s Dilemna. Even if you don’t want to do it, you still have to out of fear that your neighbor might do it just to get you first.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2007 @ 4:35 PM
Hey –
Yep.
i was just pointing to the fact that the dilemma appeared NOT as a conscious choice people made to invest themselves in agriculture, but more of an accident due to temporarily rising carrying capacity, sedentism and pop growth… and really, maybe only one of many made that choice. But thanks to prisoner’s dilemma, we know what must have happened to any that did not
Janene
Comment by janene — 6 June 2007 @ 12:10 PM
[quote]I’m talking about that last transition—that one happens because of a Prisoner’s Dilemna. Even if you don’t want to do it, you still have to out of fear that your neighbor might do it just to get you first. [/quote]
This doesn’t sound quite right to me. I mean, if nobody’s ever tried agriculture before, why would you fear that your neighbor would suddenly do so? It makes more sense to me that, due to increasingly severe and therefore traumatic climate changes, a group just decided that it’s had enough: next time the angry sky gods decide to punish (starve) them, they’ll have had enough stored to survive the divine wrath. That’s how you get agriculture for the first time. And only then does Prisoner’s Dilemma (the fear of what your neighbors will do to you if you don’t start farming) kick in.
Comment by Hasha — 6 June 2007 @ 12:58 PM
Hey –
Oh sure, Hasha… I think Jason is pointing out that the conscious choice to intensify is a response to PD, whereas up to that point it is just slowly intensifying horticulture.
Janene
Comment by janene — 6 June 2007 @ 2:30 PM
Horticulture arises fairly easily from hunting and gathering, given the opportunity. At that level, you have co-evolution and similar trends. But there’s also a divide between that and the intensification that gets you from horticulture to agriculture, and from co-evolution to domestication. It’s a Rubicon, a choice that has to be made to actively intensify existing trends.
Our ancestors weren’t stupid. Hunter-gatherer mythology reveals that they understood that more food meant more people, and they also knew all about the plants they relied on. Once wheat was incorporated into horticulture, they must have quickly learned how well it scaled, and with that piece of knowledge, the Prisoner’s Dilemma was on.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 June 2007 @ 5:46 PM
Jason, do you think you could go over why horticulture/permaculture won’t scale to feed cities? Is it simply a matter of its requiring too much human labor to support a non-producing class, or is it something else?
Comment by Hasha — 7 June 2007 @ 9:51 PM
Jason, there was a response you made to a comment I placed over on one of the posts on JMG’s site that I wished to respond to at the time, but felt that it was off topic, given that his blog seems primarily to be about the analysis of myth at a meta-level rather than the analysis of modes of living as a component of particular myths. Having found this revival of the issue here, it’s obviously the appropriate place to do so, so I shall…
I wrote:
All learning involves mistakes. The question is, do we throw away what we have learnt and return to the start, in which case we inevitably repeat the same mistakes as our descendants will think no differently than our ancestors did, or do we go forward from the foundation we have built?
And your response:
Mistakes? Learning? That would imply that somewhere, this pattern [of the failure of agricultural cultures] didn’t hold. Where is that? So where is this secret success story of all the things we’ve learned from agriculture? I think what we’ve learned is that agriculture doesn’t work. That’s what we’ve learned.
For a start, it is only in the last 50 or so years that we have begun to reach the understandings on modern agriculture that make up “that which we have learned”. As was pointed out at the time, organic farming and permaculture are both the culmination of this learning applied to the discipline of growing food. We cannot expect to find examples in the past of things that we have only recently learned so it seems spurious to look there for them and claim that we’ve learnt nothing when we cannot find them.
Beyond this, my original comment had an additional point that was missed, most likely due to my attempt to keep it brief.
A return to primitivism does away with agriculture, yet relies on future oral tradition to preserve the knowledge of the dangers of agriculture. As we all know, it’s easy to forget, and also easy to object and “go your own way”. To try out new things. Future primitive cultures will be no different, so in a thousand years, when the current period is the stuff of myth, they will get the idea in their heads to store a bit of food, to manage the landscape a little more, and so the whole cycle will be repeated again (obviously sans the stored sunlight we are now making use of) This is what I meant by throwing it away.
Before going further, I’d like to set out some definitions, according to my way of thinking, to limit confusion. You’ve stated in other places that primitivism is on a spectrum with agriculture, and also permaculture. We need to set out what this spectrum is measuring.
All activities concerned with feeding ourselves involve gathering and hunting, so the spectrum cannot be comparing some degree of these. The spectrum must necessarily be one of levels of interference and modification of the environment. Primitivism lies at the end of the spectrum advocating minimal interference with the environment, at it’s most extreme collecting what nature sees fit to provide. At the other end lies agriculture and horticulture, both of which involve large amounts of environmental modification.
You have placed permaculture close to the primitivism end of the spectrum, but I would disagree with this. Permaculture is a systems analysis approach to agriculture/horticulture. Sure it aims to utilise understandings gained from analysis of the natural world, but it is utilising them in the context of modifying the environment to feed people. So permaculture more correctly lies at the end of the spectrum closest to agriculture. Agribusiness, the monocultural, high energy approach to agriculture is one method of agriculture, and seems to be that which you have, rightly, the greatest objections to. That the word agriculture is taken to be a synonym of agribusiness is an unfortunate problem.
Back to the original point: by adapting and growing from agriculture as it is developing today we take into the future new forms of agriculture that include everything we have learned to date. In future generations all of this history will be inherent in the practices the people of the future undertake on a daily basis. The people of this future will have knowledge of agriculture as it will be something they are actively practicing on a daily basis. Those at the far end of the primitivist track, on the other hand, will not have this, they will have no knowledge of agriculture and so they will be well positioned to blindly begin all over again when they decide to try something that to them is a “new” idea (”Storing food over winter, who ever would have thought of that?! What a great idea!!”)
So where to from here? The ultimate question of the validity of primitivism as an approach to the future, compared to the cultivation of the field, ie agriculture.
In the comments over at JMG there seems to be an implicit assumption that primitivism will be able to feed the teeming masses. I’ve arrived at this conclusion based on the fact that it was stated a number of times that enlightened agriculture is not “scaleable”, being used as an argument against it, therefore implying that the alternative, primitivism, is. So permaculture cannot feed a city, but primitivism can? I think not. If we are to ask which system is going to limit the fallout from the decline the only answer is a new agriculture. It might only operate at a village scale, but it is far easier to devolve to village scale living that it is to wipe the cities off the map and return to the forests. Your proposed solution would involve much more death in the short term.
Primitivism will support a smaller population base than any future variant of an enlightened agriculture. In the initial stages of decline, a mass movement to primitivism would quickly see the entire remnant wild food larder stripped bare, followed by a catastrophic starvation. You cannot regrow the wilds in all their idyllic abundance in less than a generation, probably not in less than a dozen, therefore you cannot expect an overpopulated world to be able to use this as a tool for a “civilised” decline. We need to be able to get past those first few “hard winters” (figuratively and literally) in order to be alive to be able to adapt from there. If everyone is dead in the first winter because they ate all the food over summer, what then?
Agriculture, post abundant fossil fuels, is also unable to support the current world population, but an enlightened agriculture is going to be able to support a lot more people, for long enough to allow further adaptation of methods and lifestyles to actually get us across the finish line to some kind of future. To me it seems a vastly more sensible approach to mitigating the consequences of our past mistakes.
In the end, the debate over primitivism vs agriculture will probably go on long into the future. It’s two fundamentally different world views. Where you see living in harmony with nature, chewing on bark and beetles and sucking the dew off mossy stones as a glorious future for humanity, I see living in harmony with nature, eating fresh baked bread, a couple of slices of bacon and a mug of homebrewed beer as a satisfactory result for the effort invested. Yes, here I am referring the latest post about the lazy lifestyle of the primitives
On that note, the affliction of modern work is not about the style of agriculture practiced, it’s about working yourself to death to secure the land needed for any form of living, given modern society. Based on my experience I could produce our families food with probably an hour or two of labour a day. Obviously primitivism has a solution to this in the abolition of ownership and setting us all free to roam as we will, without fear of accusations of trespass, but in the meantime…
All the best,
Geoff
Comment by Geoff — 7 June 2007 @ 11:24 PM
Geoff, I’ll let Jason answer the bulk of your post himself, but I thought I’d address the following:
[quote]In the comments over at JMG there seems to be an implicit assumption that primitivism will be able to feed the teeming masses. I’ve arrived at this conclusion based on the fact that it was stated a number of times that enlightened agriculture is not “scaleable”, being used as an argument against it, therefore implying that the alternative, primitivism, is. So permaculture cannot feed a city, but primitivism can? I think not.[/quote]
Nobody here thinks that hunting and gathering will ever be able to support billions. What seems to be the case is that we have simply overshot the carrying capacity of this planet for our species, and in the long run, nothing will be able to maintain this population size. Jason’s argument, as I understand it, is that agriculture is not sustainable, that is, no matter what you do, it won’t last. Further, agriculture is the only thing that can maintain this population size. Therefore, since agriculture won’t last, it follows that our population will go down. On the other hand, the survivors of this mess will necessarily be hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists (not agriculturalists), because (given the unsustainability of agriculture) nobody who isn’t either a forager or a horticulturalist will be able to survive.
Comment by Hasha — 8 June 2007 @ 12:05 AM
Geoff,
I could hug you man. If JMG’s perspective is similar to yours then this primitivist vs. agriculturalist argument over at the Archdruid Report is about semantics.
Hasha already covered population decline and I’ll let Jason cover whatever points he wants to take up, but I have no problem with permaculture/horticulture.
My greatest fear is of expansive agriculture and densely populated cities because well… they have a tendency to expand and have a history of being intolerant of other ways of living. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but I think that’s what most of us here are afraid of when John defends agriculture and cities.
Anyways, thanks for the empathy.
Comment by locke — 8 June 2007 @ 12:26 AM
By the way, I don’t know too many primitivists who are planning on giving up alcohol. =p Civilization is not requirement for that. It probably won’t be grain alcohol though.
Comment by locke — 8 June 2007 @ 12:32 AM
Hasha, nothing (excepting miracles) is going to support the current population, I think we can all agree.
The statement “Jason’s argument, as I understand it, is that agriculture is not sustainable, that is, no matter what you do, it won’t last” gets to the heart of it. This assumption is made on the basis of past experience, but neglects new knowledge which has been gained, and also neglects other factors. It is my prime point of disagreement.
One of the top problems with agriculture (and I lump horticulture in with it, as they’re all fundamentally methods of cultivating the Earth) is the people that practice it, and the society that makes demands upon it.
My hope is that, going into the future, we can take the enlightened agriculture that knows all about putting back in what is taken out, soil rebuilding et al, and combine that with our enlightened understanding of overpopulation, of greed and other human failings, and ultimately get over this hump.
The unfortunate thing is that without dealing with the underlying problem of human nature there is no system on Earth that will guarantee success, not even primitivism. Once people get it into their heads to make a profit, the game is over. Agriculture actually fails due to human greed, ultimately mutating into what we know as agriculture today (agribusiness).
We’ve known for ages what the right thing to do in terms of caring for the Earth is, actually doing that is another thing entirely as history (and Jason) has shown.
Locke, thanks! I wouldn’t presume to know anyones mind, but he might say I’m equally involved in a myth, and to my detriment I’m not even conscious of it
I do doubt that he defends agriculture in this way, because that sort of city and agriculture would seem, to my superficial understanding of Druidry, to be at odds with that movement. One of their prime concerns, as I understand it, is caring for the Earth. Nothing in the way modern cities exist and feed off their environment can be said to fit that criteria.
Either way I don’t think we’ll see densely populated cities bleeding the Earth dry in the future, primarily because nothing can suck the quantities of production out like fossil fuels can.
I do fear what will happen on the downslope. There are already calls over here to do away with small farms and consolidate land, “bigger is better” style farming to cope with the climate change crisis. This style of farming will be seen as the way forward, almost to the point of one company controlling all food growing for “efficiency”, in order to support the maximum possible population. This type of agriculture is certainly to be feared as yet another round of trying the same thing over again.
As for the alcohol, making the distinction between “garden” culture (horticulture) and “field” culture (agriculture) when looking at a vineyard is a tough one
Comment by Geoff — 8 June 2007 @ 3:09 AM
Geoff said:
Geoff also said:
Generally, the line Jason draws between horticulture & agriculture is the point at which you reach diminishing returns. For my part, I say that generally means once you start tilling & monocropping. Ultimately, you could say foraging, horticulture & agriculture are all on one spectrum, but that’s a little misleading because when we say horticultre (or foraging) we’re only talking about the part of the spectrum that occurs before the point of diminishing returns.
Having said that, it appears that all horticulturalists forage (hunt & gather) and that all foragers engage in some level of cultivation/environmental modification.
As for permaculture being a systems approach, I’ve seen that argument before, and I *somewhat* agree, but it comes with a pretty big caveat. By the time Fukuoka was done working out his “Do-Nothing” method of growing crops, what he had was pretty similar to what Mollison ended up with. The interesting part of that is that Fukuoka approached the issue from a wildly different perspective. As a young man, he had an epiphany about the limits of human knowledge and set out to show how partnering with nature is better than trying to “master” nature. Fukuoka’s is a very animistic, bottom-up approach; Mollison’s (and Holmgren’s) are very much top-down (which is where the “systems approach” comes from). But they both lead to remarkably similar forms of food production (all the way down to zones, whether consciously designed or not).
Lastly, whether or not it’s Agribusiness that’s tilling & monocropping or small subsistence farmers that are tilling & monocropping - tilling & monocropping are dangerous actions.
Comment by jhereg — 8 June 2007 @ 7:54 AM
Geoff, my impression is that there isn’t much new we have learned in 10000 years of expanding agriculture; actually, i have a hunch that “we”, i.e. first world culture, would with all probability have failed to come up with most of the principles of permaculture and the like, was it not for the examples of more “primitive” cultures that we by sheer luck haven’t wiped out too quickly. The principles of biological/ecological/biodynamic agriculture developed in the early 20th century look quite crude compared to the continent-wide wild gardens sustained by the indigenous cultures in the americas prior to invasion. The only thing foragers and forager-permaculturalists MIGHT not have known, that “we” now are BEGINNING to understand a tiny part of (if it can at all be comprehended), is the details of how immensely destructive scaling-up agriculture will end up. I would much rather know it only as a philosophically possible consequence of lamentable conditions and actions, which probably any averagely smart animist could figure out. (BTW, i don’t see “Primitivism” excluding perma/horticulture, what with all this Jason’s “spectrum” talk & all.)
Comment by nagnagnag — 8 June 2007 @ 10:24 AM
I don’t either. Anthropik doesn’t seem to either for that reason. There does seem to be a certain amount of fluidity to it.
Comment by jhereg — 8 June 2007 @ 10:40 AM
Actually, no; most permaculture systems actually require much less labor, as they leverage ecology to do a lot of the work for you. But, for instance, typically permaculture relies heavily on perennials, particularly trees. Even in industrialized groves, mechanizing harvesting has been difficult. The original mass-harvesting machine, the scythe, is useless. And in a permacultural context, mass-harvesting from such trees is going to be extremely difficult. So the energy is worthwhile to feed yourself and anyone who can physically walk into the grove, but gathering up enough fruit to justify a trip into the city to sell at market is going to be another thing entirely.
Another factor is that while permaculture can often get you even greater yields per acre, it does so because it’s what permaculturalists call “edge.” The edge between two ecosystems is the most vibrant area, as in a coast, or where forest meets prairie. That means that you can’t simply multiply your maximal yield per acre by the number of acres; a forest, for instance, needs a certain amount of unbroken space to be healthy and viable. You can then use permaculture all along its perimeter to take advantage of its edge, but the area of the forest itself may be much less productive in terms of human food. So permacultural techniques also don’t scale very well because they’re so localized, and usually require a great deal of “wilderness,” or zone 5.
Much of that depends on what we mean by “organic farming.” The most common usage—regular old monocropping, just without the pesticides—is simply agriculture prior to the Green Revolution, a type of cultivation that’s already destroyed most of the planet’s capacity to sustain it. All that agriculture’s taught us is that kind of agriculture doesn’t work. Now, permaculture is something else; but then again, permaculture is largely reinventing the wheel. The techniques we call permaculture are largely identical to those used by horticultural tribes. They may well be sustainable (or not; 10,000 years isn’t nearly enough time to tell, even the most unsustainable systems will typically last longer than that), but did we really learn that from agriculture? After all, horticulture is what we were doing before the Agricultural Revolution.
Firstly, orality is at least as good at preserving such lessons as literacy, and often better. See Ong’s Literacy & Orality. The literate mind routinely dismisses the value of orality (just as the oral mind routinely distrusts literacy), but this is little more than a form of ethnocentrism. In reality, orality is very effective at preserving such ideas over very long periods of time.
Secondly, and more importantly, no, it depends on no such thing. Preserving a taboo against something is a very poor way to stop it. There will always be someone who thinks they know better. This is simply an appeal to conscience, and that fundamentally does not work. As Garrett Hardin wrote in “Tragedy of the Commons”:
So however the memory is preserved, no appeal to conscience can ever stop anything in the long-term. That’s not what will keep agriculture from re-appearing.
Consider, why did agriculture arise when and where it did? It’s only in the most recent, tiny sliver of humanity’s evolution that anyone farmed, and for most of that time, it was a tiny minority of our species that did so. Was it that earlier people were too “stupid”? We have ample evidence that their intelligence was at least equal, and probably better, and besides, we also know that agriculture leads to a dramatically reduced quality of life—just look at Dickson’s Mounds. Literally from one generation to the next, agriculture reduced the average height by more than a foot and cut life expectancy in half, while introducing diseases their parents and grandparents had never even heard of before. It could hardly be painted more dramatically. So it doesn’t take intelligence to adopt such a way of life. So what was it?
Consider instead that agriculture is not always viable, and that it arose when and where it did because it’s adapted only to a very specific circumstance. Cereal grains are extremely fickle; their evolutionary niche is a very short-term one, filling in when disaster strikes and preparing the ground for later succession. Outside of the climate of the Holocene, agriculture is simply not possible.
Agriculture isn’t just something we “choose” to do. It’s exactly what it looks like: a blip, an aberration, an anomoly already resolving itself. It’s simply a classic case of overshoot, as William Catton already argued so well. What’s going to stop agriculture in the future isn’t going to be any appeal to conscience, but the simple fact that it will take far too much energy, with not nearly enough payoff.
It’s on a spectrum with permaculture, but not agriculture. The spectrum measures to what degree a group takes a proactive stacne towards its food; the further down the “hunter-gatherer” side of the spectrum you are, the more you value idleness; the farther up the permaculture side of the spectrum you are, the more proactive you are in cultivating your food.
Agriculture has a hard break from permaculture, though. Permacultural and hunter-gatherer techniques promote ecological health and biodiversity, so that humans can take part in that. Agriculture’s approach, however, is to break down ecologies into units of human food production. The typical wheat field, for instance, is a disaster area. To quote Richard Manning’s “The Oil We Eat“:
So if we look at this from the perspective of ecology, agriculture is the opposite of permaculture: permaculture creates food and human prosperity alongside ecological prosperity by encouraging higher levels of succession. Agriculture reduces ecology to a food machine by reducing succession to its lowest stages. The process of agriculture is that of man-made catastrophe. From that alone, its ecological history should not be surprising.
I’d say that primitivism can be anywhere along the hunter-gatherer/permacultural spectrum, which could be anything from minimal interference, to the full-blown artificial food forests of the Amazon, or the artificially-created Great Plains. Primitive societies terraformed the Americas on a truly massive scale. It’s not modification that makes the difference, but rather, the kind of modification. Destroying an ecosystem and cultivating an ecosystem are both “modifications,” but they’re worlds apart from each other. “Modification” is far too broad a term, and in this case, that makes it useless. The real difference is what kind of modification are you making—does your way of life depend on building up your landbase, or destroying it? Does your community survive by making your landbase richer, or by mimicking a natural disaster every year? This is by far the more important dividing line.
That would follow if the important discussion were degree of modification. But that’s hardly a sensible criteria. For instance, in the Allegheny National Forest, logging proponents have used the Seneca tradition of horticultural fire-setting to justify logging, as if a food forest is equivalent to clear-cutting, simply because both involved modification. This criteria is ultimately based in the Romantic myth of the “untrammeled wilderness,” an incomprehensible mythology that unfortunately continues to frame far too much of our ecological discourse. Humans are part of their ecology; the better question is, what role do we play in it? Do we contribute to it, or do we diminish it? If the criteria is human involvement, then a flourishing food forest is no different from clear-cutting. But if the criteria is the role humans play in their ecology, then the two could not be more different.
Agribusiness is the logical end point of agriculture. Small-scale farmers are simply small-scale disasters; they stake out their land, and proceed to annihilate the ecology, in order to promote the growth of disaster-adapted plants. The plow is nothing more than a disaster machine, mimicking the effects of a flood, fire, or other natural disaster. That is what a plow is for. The very essence of a farm is to strip a piece of land of its status as a living ecology, and to instead see it as a unit for the production of human food. Farmers throughout history have complained of wilderness “going to waste,” or worse, “harboring vermin” that eat their crops. The very nature of agriculture, long before the Industrial Revolution, put the farmer at war with the natural world. The best farmer mythologies inserted some nuance into that conflict, but none could deny it. To quote Daniel Quinn from “Technology and the Other War,” commenting on Isaiah 2:3-5:
The effects of agriculture have certainly been accelerated by the Green Revolution, but global warming, population growth and mass extinction did not begin just 200 years ago. They have been trends over the past 10,000 years. All we’ve seen in the last 200 is an acceleration of those pre-existing trends.
I did not get that reading at all. That’s often cited to discredit primitivism, but the problem is, nothing can feed the “teeming masses.” The only thing that can feed 6.5 billion people is industrial agriculture; that’s why it took industrial agriculture to produce 6.5 billion people. But of course, no one here would argue that the current state of affairs is sustainable. That means that die-off is unavoidable. Industrial agriculture is unsustainable, so one day it will crash; whether or not there’s any alternatives available then, primitive or otherwise, die-off will be the consequence of industrial agriculture’s failure. If primitive alternatives exist, that simply means that fewer will die.
So-called “organic agriculture” will more likely contribute to the die-off, since many people will believe the claims that agriculture can work anywhere with sufficient hard work. It resonates more with our cultural mythology, so most people who try anything at all will try homesteading, and they’ll quickly discover that the Great Plains are already a desert, that North America’s soil is already 85% depleted, and the best off is Australia with “only” 55%. They’ll learn that we adopted the Green Revolution out of necessity, because we’d finally exhausted the world’s agricultural capacity, and without it, only a few, special pockets will remain arable. The rest will spend their time and effort planting seeds in dead sand, and then dying of starvation when they never sprout.
Primitive lifestyles, on the other hand, have built up dead soils and gathered a living out of much harsher terrain. But the idea that human prosperity could have a positive correlation with ecological health is so alien to us, thanks to our myth of the “untrammeled wilderness,” that very few people will even consider the alternative. There will be some places where agricultural homesteading will work, but they will be exceptional. Over most of the planet, the only thing that will work will land somewhere on the hunter-gatherer/permaculture spectrum. And the most terrible tragedy of all, resources will not be the bottle-neck. Imagination to try it in the first place will be a far more limiting factor than the resources to support it.
Not at all, though I think what you mean by “enlightened agriculture” is what I would call “permaculture,” and would thus be a kind of primitivism. But I digress; the point about scalability was not to suggest that primitivism does scale, but rather to point out that there is no sustainable alternative that can scale to the needs of a civilization; i.e., to feed cities. That means that cities are the epiphenomenon of an unsustainable way of life, and are thus themselves unsustainable.
I don’t think you’re really seeing my proposal, since you’re seeing it through the lens of this myth about the “untrammeled wilderness.” The first step is permaculture. In the cities, you can have neighborhood gardens that will eventually break down into villages; in rural areas, you can grow food forests and help rewild our domesticates. That would allow us to begin helping to proactively repair the ecological damage of civilization, and gradually “powerdown” to a long-term sustainable system, which would eventually be localized bands and/or villages living somewhere on the hunter-gatherer/permaculture spectrum.
But the ideal is very unlikely. However, if you start a permaculture garden in the city, or if you start a food forest garden, or if you learn primitive skills, you’re helping move us towards that goal. In all likelihood, though, that won’t be sufficient, and there will be a violent collapse and die-off anyway. Even in that case, you’ve put yourself in a much better position for survival. I don’t expect anything to be able to change our trajectory; what I expect now is a matter of natural selection. Civilization will collape, and those that depend on civilization will die without it, while those who don’t depend on it will survive. That’s certainly how every other case of overshoot in nature works; why would we expect to go any differently? If there is a way to avoid that fate, then I’m already doing everything I can to move us towards that. And if I’m right that there isn’t (and I’ve never wanted more to be proven wrong), then I’m still doing the best to ensure my survival and that of others.
Only if there was some kind of miracle that suddenly turned everyone into primitivists. I don’t see that happening, do you? The number of people pursuing that path is far, far smaller than the number that it could support. No, the world can’t support 6.5 billion foragers, but 6.5 billion people are never going to try. The imagination to try is going to be a much smaller bottleneck than the resources that can support us.
Well, you can barely digest bread—or the beer, for that matter. Not the alcohol so much as the grain. You’re not a bird; you don’t have lectin-inhibitors. Sure, on one level it’s a matter of worldview, but there’s also solid facts underlying this. To grow wheat regularly you need to destroy your ecology. That’s what makes wheat grow. What you get for it is not something you can really digest. When it comes down to it, primitive life worked well, producing long-lived, healthy, happy people for two million years. Agriculture produced famine and disease for populations that considered 40 years old ancient, and brought itself to the brink of annihilation amidst climatic chaos and mass extinction in 1/200 of that time. And you’re also pointing to the worst days in a hunter-gatherer’s life; the better comparison would be your bird food with some liquified bird food to wash it down, compared to my venison, pork, and a plethora of foods you’ve probably never even heard of. It’s a simple matter of ethnographic fact that hunter-gatherers enjoy a far richer, more varied diet than any farmer; the average hunter-gatherer eats more types of food in a week than most farmers will get in their entire lifetime. They even beat out the cosmopolitan modern American.
That’s certainly a big part of it for me. I’m not going to argue that primitive lifestyles will keep the cities intact; far from it, the very crux of my argument is that the cities were a bad idea from the beginning, and nothing can sustain them.
I’m reminded of an old Mac Hall comic that apparently no longer exists—two drunk college kids sitting about, and one comments on the thousands of intoxicating plants in the Amazon, and why that inspired the Europeans to create their civilization, with nothing more than moldy wheat and rotten grapes, so they could have that much to get wasted on, too. Moral of the story: primitives have a greater variety in their intoxicants.
Is it? If you’re destroying your landbase, that’s not sustainable, for all the same reasons that cutting your legs out from underneath you is unsustainable. And if that’s not what you’re doing, then what you’re doing is permaculture, not agriculture.
Is it possible to grow wheat in a permaculture, rather than an agriculture? The ecological niche that wheat fills makes that a tricky question, but I can’t role it out. It may well be possible. The big question that divides agriculture from permaculture is whether your landbase is richer or poorer once you’re done. In that sense, agriculture is unsustainable by its very definition. I don’t see this as tautological at all; this is an important distinction. Whether or not a given system involves human modification is a silly criteria, because all ways of life involve human modification. We live and breathe and have an impact on everything around us like any other animal, so the idea of the “untrammeled wilderness” is ultimately a subspecies of our aspiration to “transcend” our animality and become purely inhabitants of Plato’s fantasy of the world of Forms. It’s born of a hatred of the world, and a yearning for some fantasy of pure thought or spirit detached from the world. So, it’s a fairly perverse perspective, all in all.
The question of whether a given strategy promotes greater ecological health, or consumes ecological health, is much more important. The food forests of Amazonian horticulturalists built the world’s largest rain forest; obviously, modification is not an applicable criteria here. But the analogue that agriculturalists have produced was to turn the great cedar forests of the Fertile Crescent into a blasted wasteland. Both are quite modified, but the nature of that modification could hardly be more different. Derrick Jensen likewise defined sustainability as giving back more than you take. The difference between permaculture and agriculture is that permaculture builds up an ecology for humans to partake in; agriculture breaks down an ecology to create a unit of human food production.
The problem with agriculture is that this lumping obscures the issue. Hunting and gathering is also modifying the environment, so shouldn’t that be lumped in, as well? What way of life doesn’t involve modifying the environment? And in that case, what good is it to look at “modification”? The question isn’t whether you modify, but what kind of modification you undertake. From the unspoken assumption of the “untrammeled wilderness,” we get the criteria of “modification,” and from that we can justify clear-cutting with the example of food forests, and we can justify the devastation of the Fertile Crescent as just the same as building up the Amazon. But it’s all an example of GIGO—garbage in (the unspoken assumption of our myth of “untrammeled wilderness”), garbage out (the absurdity of conflating clear-cutting and food forests, or agriculture and permaculture).
If it relies on learning, it will never work. People don’t respond to appeals to conscience. Civilization doesn’t destroy the world because people are mean or even ignorant, but because of the systemic properties of civilization that direct us to destroy our landbase. Likewise, lasting solutions won’t be appeals to conscience, but systemic consequences of a way of life that works with human nature, rather than tries to defy it.
Here we cut to the quick of it. “The underlying problem of human nature”? For two million years, there was no such thing. Why has “human nature” only become a problem in the past 10,000 years? Could it have something to do with the fact that 10,000 years ago we jettisoned nearly our entire evolutionary and cultural heritage, and tried to cut a radically different course—a diet of foods we could barely digest, settling nomadic hunter-gatherers in small, dense towns? There is no problem with human nature; human nature works just fine, and we have the evolutionary history to prove it. The problem is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The problems we face are systemic—the consequences of trying to force human nature into an essentially dehumanizing system. If our hope for the future rests on an appeal to conscience, it will fail. If you hope to “overcome” human nature and finally push that square peg into the round hole once and for all, it will fail. Our hope for the future is to let humans live like humans. In that context, human nature is not a problem, but a solution.
Take greed, for instance. The very same greed that made Ken Lay such a monster at Enron would take a very different course in a hunter-gatherer band. Hoarding makes no sense in that context since you need to carry what you own, so material possession is a double-edged sword. Instead, you invest in the people around you. You take care of them, help them, share with them, and then you can count on their generosity when the tables are turned. In a hunter-gatherer band, the most ruthless entrepreneurs gather their vast wealth by helping the sick, sharing all they have, always being the first one to jump up to help someone, and being everybody’s friend. In our society, of course, things are very different. The very same greed that would inspire a hunter-gatherer to help everyone, in our society, leads him to cheat everyone. The same impulse, the same human nature; all that changes is the context, and the problem of “greed” becomes a great asset.
When humans are allowed to live like humans, human nature is not a problem. Human nature is a problem only when you’re trying to force humans into a dehumanizing way of life; then, it’s their human nature that rebels against it. So, in the long term, any sustainable society has to let humans live like humans!
The myth of the “untrammeled wilderness” is certainly too widespread for me to fault you for holding, but it is a pernicious little thing. Nonetheless, it does sound more and more like we’re pretty close to on the same page, and the problem may be something of an argument over semantics (though I think the difference in semantics reflects some of the differences in values that shift because of the myth of the “untrammeled wilderness”), but I suspect we’re close to a resolution now.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 June 2007 @ 12:24 PM
JMG gets a lot of attention for the good work he does examining the role of religion in Peak Oil, and he’s become a regular feature on Energy Bulletin. Unfortunately, he can barely get through a full post without turning to primitivism, which he classifies as a brand of apocalypticism, and its failings. After responding to some of these threads about why primitivism is bad, JMG’s most recent comment told me:
I doubt this cuts both ways: we’ll no doubt continue to be subjected to the weekly primitivst hate minute regularly every Wednesday; we’re just being told that to stand up and defend ourselves when it happens is “drowning out” the discussion (of how much we suck?).
Am I overreacting to consider adding a regular feature to Anthropik, every Wednesday the “Archdruid Watch” to respond to each week’s inevitable feature on the failings of primitivism? Giuli’s idea is that we just post comments here, and make this thread an ongoing repository of responses to JMG’s weekly columns about how bad primitivism is, where comments supportive of primitivism are drowning out discussion.
Unfortunately, neither option is very good. It will be exceptionally difficult for any reader to find a response to JMG’s charges, promoted by sites like Energy Bulletin, since JMG won’t allow anyone with a differing point of view to comment for very long, or very effectively. But such is the value of the bully pulpit, and as the people being so bullied, we’ll need to come up with our own solutions. Opinions, ideas?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 June 2007 @ 11:59 AM
My response isn’t going to be published. The moderation scheme JMG implemented helps him save face: since the comment never sees the light of day, his censorship can go relatively unnoticed. Now commenters are saying that my comments defending primitivism’s narrative in specifically narrative terms is irrelevant to a discussion of primitivism’s narrative.
Here’s the comment JMG decided not to publish:
In “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age,” I entered to mention that “Opening of the Map,” the reverse process of the “Closure of the Map,” would be a trend of deindustrialization, too. Your response was that my apocalypticism (which I hadn’t mentioned) was foolish.
In “Adam’s Story: Twilight in Learyville,” you wrote a story about how foolish and unprepared kids went off to become hunter-gatherers and all died. In this piece, you wrote entirely to denounce apocalyptic narratives as “one of history’s classic losing bets.”
When I entered a thread not about apocalypticism, you turned it into one about apocalypticism because you thought it would be easier to dismiss me on those grounds than to speak to the point I’d made. The other threads I entered were in response to posts you’d written specifically to denigrate apocalypticism. And now you say, I’ve “insisted on dragging every conversation here back around to why you think your particular apocalyptic narrative is true”? In each case, apocalypticism was the subject you turned to, and my response was to rally a defense as to why I’m not a fool for holding to it. So how can I be drowning out discussion here with my defense of apocalyptic thought, when you yourself have set the topic of discussion to be the failings of apocalyptic thought? Or is that the cause right there–that the discussion should take the foolishness of people like me for granted, and center around discovering more ways to dismiss anything we have to say out of hand? Are you looking for an honest discussion, or the internet’s watered-down equivalent of a lynch mob? If the former, then someone to defend apocalyptic thought would be necessary for the discussions on apocalyptic thought that you keep starting; if the latter, only then could I understand how a defense that speaks directly to the charges you make in your posts could be drowning out the discussion, but it would also paint your blog in a much more negative light than I would have ever expected.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 June 2007 @ 1:54 PM
Jason,
One thing I can say, from following this debate, is that it’s been very educational. Observing how different sides of a conflict define themselves in relation to each other often helps (or forces) each to identify themselves more clearly than if they just expound atop their own soapboxes.
Your comments have broadened my idea of what “primitivism” is, at least as you define it. That primitivism doesn’t have to be purist or rigid, as some of the primitivists I have known seem to maintain, and that permaculture can/will be an important part of any emerging sustainable society — these are encouraging realizations.
From what I’ve seen, I don’t see that you and JMG have a tremendous difference of opinion. At least not about the future. You both agree that civilization isn’t working and that collapse in some form is coming fairly soon, and that surviving means utilizing older skills and older ways of relating.
Honestly, I lean towards JMG’s perspective, in terms of approach and content. I like his emphasis on encompassing a variety of narratives. And I find questionable the statement you’ve made a few times about how you think that “everything truly wrong in this world will be gone inside of my lifetime” — that does strike me as simplistically apocalyptic. Certainly you’ve been more hard-line than JMG on agriculture. But, I don’t know, there still seems to be a great degree of consonance in your ideas. Just some semantic difficulties, and differences in your angles of approach.
But then of course there’s the whole narrative thing. Ironically, I get the sense that JMG has developed his own narrative about what primitivism is, and doesn’t want to let it be the more complex thing that it is to you. That does tend to stifle conversation. It’s unfortunate that he’s taken this stance with you.
Anyway, from my point of view (as the selfish, gleeful spectator watching the mud-wrestling contest
), I’ve found this whole discussion enriching. Just thought you’d like to know.
Comment by David — 9 June 2007 @ 3:18 PM
[quote]Am I overreacting to consider adding a regular feature to Anthropik, every Wednesday the “Archdruid Watch” to respond to each week’s inevitable feature on the failings of primitivism?[/quote]
Sounds like a good idea to me. I do find JMG’s posts to be a worthwhile read, but after what’s happened over the past couple of weeks, I see absolutely no point in posting any comments at his blog. And yet, sometimes, I do have things to say. So… If you move the discussion here, I’d definitely participate from time to time. And given that a number of readers of this blog read JMG’s blog as well, it isn’t impossible that this would turn into a popular weekly thread. If not - you can always get rid of it (the Archdruid Watch, I mean) later.
Comment by Hasha — 9 June 2007 @ 4:50 PM
Jason, I think the thinking is all very similar, the problem certainly is semantics. Permaculture was coined from “permanent agriculture”, so is a form of agriculture to my way of thinking.
Now that I can see that the scope of your definition of primitivism actually includes all the best aspects of agriculture, just by a different name, and that your definition of agriculture primarily covers those aspects of the monocultural method of agriculture that we agree are certainly unsustainable, I can see that there is no need for dissent, excepting if I were to be pedantic and insist on proper use of terminology, which I’m not in this case.
Comment by Geoff — 10 June 2007 @ 2:03 AM
What Hasha said.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 10 June 2007 @ 2:31 AM
Sounds like he knows you got him on the ropes as far as the facts are concerned. Not to mention the fact that he himself falls back on such dubious “facts” as the sustainably of rice agriculture in pre-modern Japan and China. (HA!)
Comment by venuspluto67 — 10 June 2007 @ 10:25 AM
Geoff, I thought that might be the case. I’m glad to hear it! It’s true that the phrase “permaculture” did originally derive from “permanent agriculture,” but it’s nothing that most people would recognize as agriculture. Most tribal societies in the Americas were practicing horticulture (I’ve yet to find any significant difference between what anthropologists call “horticulture” and what some others have called “permaculture,” leading me to think that permaculture’s greatest failing may be reinventing the wheel). Europeans walked right through their vast forest gardens without ever realizing what they were. When you say “agriculture,” 99 out of 100 people think of a tilled, monocropped field that looks, behaves and operates nothing like a permaculture garden. And permaculture much more fits in with our normal conception of gardening, as well. I think our intuitive sense of these words reflect a basic understanding that these are extraordinarily different phenomenon, which is why we call one “farming” and one “gardening.” I think you obscure a lot when you call permaculture a kind of agriculture. If you want to get pedantic, of course, I’d point to the precise use of such terms in anthropology, so it’s not even using terms improperly on the technical level. On the technical level and on the intuitive level, the difference between gardening and farming is absolutely crucial, and easily divides sustainable methods from unsustainable methods.
David, thanks!
Hasha and VenusPluto, I guess that settles it—Wednesday’ll see the first “Archdruid Watch.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 June 2007 @ 9:56 AM
God I can’t believe I missed this one. This post is so amazingly great. Thank you so much for doing what you do. It is truly a beautiful and genius explanation of apocalypticism. Thank you so much! Also, I think the weekly druid watch is fucking hilarious and brilliant (of course you know I would). I’m actually really glad my JMG acted like a bitch. I would have totally missed this whole thing.
Comment by Urban Scout — 15 June 2007 @ 12:24 PM
wtf? he ain’t “my JMG.” haha. typo.
Comment by Urban Scout — 15 June 2007 @ 12:25 PM
about Japanese agriculture I can add (citing from “Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective”): “As [Japanese] farmers abandoned fallowing [in the 1350-1700 period], employing in its stead fertilizer materials that would sustain regular annual cropping and multiple-cropping, they gathered more and more leaffall and litter from nearby hillsides and wasteland. As centuries passed, ever more hillsides were raked clean of all debris, new growth became sparse, and desperate villagers took to removing lower branches of trees and digging up roots to obtain the necessary mulch, fuel, or other material. In the process, however, they made the hillsides more and more vulnerable to erosion, thereby contributing to downstream sedimentation, flooding, and destruction.”
So, to keep agricultural soil well nourished, they transported plant nutrients from the forests to their soils, thereby depleting the forests more and more. Conclusion: Japanese agriculture, contrary to for example “Japan’s sustainable society in the Edo period (1603-1867)” (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/5140), was not sustainable, even though there was some considerable amount of recycling, which only slows the process of depletion.
Comment by tony — 1 February 2009 @ 3:26 PM