Archdruid Watch: Adam’s Morbid Fantasy
by Jason GodeskyThis week, the Archdruid Report continues “Adam’s Story.” The first installment, published three weeks ago, was “Twilight in Learyville,” wherein Adam left behind the former tourist town in the Pacific Northwest where he’d grown up after the deaths of his sweetheart and his father. This week’s installment, “Nanmin Voyages,” deals with the consequences of waves of Japanese refugees crossing the Pacific to North America. Greer has said that these fictional narratives are tools to help put the situation in perspective, and I heartily agree that fictional narratives can be helpful in that way. But in order to achieve that goal, they need to portray what’s likely, not simply indulge one’s own morbid fantasies.
The most egregious example of this occurs in the first installment, as Greer describes the primitivists who passed through Learyville on their way into the wilderness.
No, most of the ones who came had a different dream. They parked their cars in the café parking lot, paid for one more civilized meal, and then headed out into the woods, convinced they were destined to found the tribal societies of an age about to be born. Those who spotted Adam tried to talk him into coming along; their excited gestures and bright eyes lit up a grand vision of life in the wilderness in harmony with nature, walking the hunter-gatherer path. The first few times he’d gone back to the motel with his head afire, and his father had to sit him down and explain exactly what would happen to a bunch of city kids who thought nature would welcome them with open arms. He’d been right, too. Some of them came stumbling back out of the forest months later, starving and shivering and riddled with parasites. Others never came out at all, and Adam got used to finding their bones in the woods when he and his father went hunting deer in the hills outside of town. For them, nature had opened not her arms but her jaws.
Certainly, someone who wanders into the woods with no knowledge of the natural world won’t last very long there. The death of Christopher McCandless along the Stampede Trail near Denali National Park provided Jon Krakauer with the subject material for his book, Into the Wild. You’ll frequently find In the Wild on primitivist reading lists for precisely this reason—notice, for instance, that it makes Daniel Quinn’s reading list. Quinn writes:
I include this book as recommended reading because I hear from so many youngsters who, like Chris McCandless (the subject of the book), dream of fleeing civilization, of striking out on their own in the wilderness, of “living off the land.” Although this is primarily the story of McCandless’s failure to recognize the difficulties of such an undertaking, the author includes several similar accounts of individuals taking on “the wild” singlehandedly, with the romantic notion that this is what a capable and resourceful person should be able to do. All victims of the Great Forgetting, they were blissfully (and ultimately tragically) unaware that humans did not evolve as rugged individualists, each taking on the task of survival on his or her own. Our ancestors, who universally lived “in the wild,” always faced the task tribally and never took it on singlehandedly. They knew that-even with all their survival wisdom, garnered over countless generations-living in the wild is far too much for any isolated individual to cope with.
Humans, alone in the “wilderness,” do die. Were these “primitivists” setting out to found tribal societies all by themselves? Or were they simply completely ignorant of any kind of primitive skills? I’m about as green as one can come, and even I know how to overcome the problems that keep killing off Greer’s dramatis personae. The elder nanmin sister in the second installment died from an infected cut, something that a decent poultice made from leaves borrowed from Grandfather’s Footsteps could have helped alleviate. Adam’s sweetheart stumbles out of the woods, afflicted with some tick-borne disease. Checking for ticks every evening isn’t just a matter of safety and health, it’s a bonding experience for a would-be tribe, as well, the same way other primates groom one another. Even if you missed one and a disease did develop, the natural world is not devoid of antibiotics. Lyme disease is easily treated with a vigorous antibiotic regimen when caught in time, and there are plenty of antibacterial herbs that can be employed to make such a treatment, including, once again, Grandfather’s Footsteps.
Of course, only 2-3% of tick bites result in infection, and there’s mounting evidence that even that rate of infection is due to our indoor lifestyle and lack of exposure; more frequent tick bites results in a significantly decreased incidence of Lyme disease. Primitive cultures often used bear fat to repel insects in general; I usually use crushed lemon balm leaves.
But Greer’s primitivists apparently don’t know any of this. They haven’t even read about primitive skills to know this much; nor, apparently, have they read any primitivist authors, who frequently emphasize this point. How they ever came around the idea of forming hunter-gatherer tribes in the woods without crossing such information is a huge question. Personally, I don’t think Greer’s primitivists exist. For those who don’t know primitive skills, the “wilderness” is an intimidating place, full of danger and peril. When confronted with their choice of direction along the coast, Adam says, “South, I think. North there’s not much but wilderness for quite a ways.” Yet it only takes a taste of primitive skills to begin to realize the abundance of the living world around you. It can take a lifetime to master all the subtleties, to form a relationship with each plant, and to learn intimately the behaviors of each animal, but it doesn’t take very long at all to notice that you’re surrounded by food, medicine, shelter, and everything that you could ever need—everything humans needed to live long, happy lives for three million years before civilization arose. Greer’s fiction turns into morbid fantasy as the primitivists get what’s coming to them, as the dark and scary wilderness, the frightening Other, comes alive with its vicious “jaws” to consume those foolish enough to question the agrarian dream. To think that nature could have loving arms, or provide shelter, food, or medicine. Nature has “jaws,” the wilderness is dark and treacherous, and human life is cheap and difficult.
This is, as Greer so often points out, a question of narrative. Is the more-than-human world a “home” that provides us with all of our needs, or a perilous, dark “wilderness” that we must overcome with enormous effort and great cost of human life and suffering? Is it our home, or is it our enemy? The former is the narrative found in sane societies; the latter is the narrative of agrarian societies, a narrative that tells us that humanity is at war with the rest of the world, and must conquer the earth and subdue it. Greer is clearly coming from the agrarian narrative. The tale of the fool who tries to “go back to nature” and dies is a gleeful vindication often treasured by the agrarian mind, because they cannot escape the fact that humanity lived long enough to invent agriculture in the first place. That fact alone is possible only in one of those narratives. That’s perhaps the biggest reason for what Quinn called “the Great Forgetting,” the relegation of the bulk of the human experience to the irrelevant footnote of “prehistory,” because it defies our narrative. Its very existence proves that humans have a place in the more-than-human world, and that it provides everything we need. Because of that, we have to ignore it.
There are other bizarre oddities in Greer’s narrative, as well, such as the war. You might assume, as I did, that this was some kind of resource war fought in the Middle East, but then Greer mentions “when the fighting reached Mexico.” Civil wars do not break out willy-nilly for no apparent reason. Restricted resources almost always causes violence, but a civil war requires a level of organization that simply seems unlikely. Food riots, gang wars and so forth are downright likely, but where are the strong secessionist movements that would trigger civil war? In collapse, governments spend more and more of their time just trying to keep themselves together. Their power rarely has a decisive “end,” so much as they cease to be relevant. They become slogans to invoke, rather than actual powers to fear or obey.
Then there is the phenomenon Greer follows in the latest story, that of the nanmin—refugees from Japan.
They’d gone no more than a hundred yards when the fog lifted to westward, swirling and tearing open as the sea wind clawed at it. From the highway the land sloped toward the beach down below, and there, with its bow driven up onto the sand, was the vast black shape of Haruko’s ship. Adam had expected a fishing trawler or the like, certainly not a huge container vessel the size of a small town. Nor had he expected to see another shape like it in the middle distance making purposefully in toward the shore.
“Japan has many people,” said Haruko behind him, “and many ships. Not much food. Each year, more will come.”
In previous collapses, contraction was perhaps the single most archaeologically visible sign of collapse. Lands once cultivated were abandoned; people did not travel quite as far; signs of long-distance trade diminish; communities become more local in character. In the midst of energy decline, Greer is here predicting that our collapse will run completely counter to the trends followed by every other collapse. With diminishing energy, more Japanese will climb onto huge boats to take them all the way across the Pacific Ocean—the largest ocean in the world, accounting for an immense portion of the globe’s circumference—to crash into the beaches of the Pacific Northwest?
To his credit, Greer’s stories do capture a lot of the crushing despair and the cheapness of human life that would undoubtedly characterize the groups he describes—the people who cling to civilization to the very end, caught in a narrative about the eternal war on the more-than-human world that they must continue to uphold, lest they leave those bones that Adam kept finding in the woods. Unfortunately, the usefulness of fiction is undermined when it devolves into mere fantasy, and what Greer writes about primitivism is simply a morbid fantasy of vindication that defies the actual primitive (and primitivist) experience. Greer’s stories do capture what may very well await much of the current population; but they turn to fantasy because Greer fails to recognize that these same trends will “open the map,” and allow for a plethora of alternatives among those who hope for something better.
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.
- Last Week: “A Depopulation Explosion?“
- Next Week: “Völkerwanderung“
I’m trying to figure out how his narrative is less apocalyptic and more optimistic than ours, when apparently there’s no way for his characters to escape a grim fate, even by leaving the collapsing civilization. I mean, at least we allow for a small minority to live happy lives.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 21 June 2007 @ 11:56 AM
Well, see, when Greer says “apocalyptic” he’s really talking about a narrative that allows for “a select few” to “return to a paradise/golden age”, rather than the way the word is used in say, “Buffy: the Vampire Slayer”.
So, really, it’s not that he’s knocking primitivism for being too grim, rather the opposite, that primitivism is being too “rosy” and “blaise”.
At least, that’s the only way I can make sense of his comments. Perhaps, I’m off base.
Myself, I prefer to operate under the narrative that we’ve been in a cycle of spiralling (rather than truly cyclical) and we’re about to be returned to the proper cycle. This will, naturally, require a pretty big correction. Somehow, despite the fact that my narrative operates under a cyclical base, I’m still in agreement w/ 90+% of the Tribe Anthropik.
Hmm, I must be insane or self-deluded.
Comment by jhereg — 21 June 2007 @ 12:24 PM
Not at all; we share an underlying, cyclical narrative. Yet it’s also quite clear that our current mode of life is a freakish aberration, and that we are now far removed from equilibrium. It’s an incident of overshoot, a flash in the pan. These things happen, and they’re always corrected in the same way. You return to equilbrium, and the underlying cyclical narrative takes over again.
“This has been a broadcast of civilization. We now return you to your regularly scheduled cycles.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 12:30 PM
I think you missed the understated sarcasm.
Comment by jhereg — 21 June 2007 @ 12:40 PM
That’s entirely possible; I’m dull like that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 12:43 PM
You said before, that a citizen of a bronze age kingdom could be free if only he could walk a few days out of range of the kingdom’s army.
But now, it turns out it is not quite as simple. One must know how to live a different life.
Greer’s “primitivists” are walking out, just like you’ve suggested, but without establishing the necessary skills.
Comment by _Gi — 21 June 2007 @ 6:46 PM
If you want to splice hairs like that, then “free” and “alive” are two different things. I never said walking off into the woods without knowing how to survive was a good idea. In fact, I’ve frequently emphasized the importance of primitive skills, tribal relationships and an animist mindset. So I’m afraid your little trap falls a little flat.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 8:10 PM
Jason, you are wrong! Some humans can survive alone in the wilderness!!!!! How do you account for the mountain men? This is’nt some fantasy, it’s fact.
Sure we’re over 100 years from that time, and granted that was a long time ago, almost no one can accomplish this feat, being from today’s society. I’m not suggesting that anyone try this approach, you’d have to been raised in the wild and quite knowledgable of the natural enviroment. An example of what this lifestyle might look like can be found in either the book or movie, “Alone in the Wilderness”.
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 9:27 PM
i’ve been a little confused by this turn that Greer has taken, myself. i like it better when he concentrates more on positive actions, and appropriate ways we can climb back down the Big Machine Age ladder before it burns up under us.
and i get really frustrated by this need within some circles to totally be in command of The Only Possible Way…if variety and adaptability are indeed among the stronger survival attributes of humans, then it makes sense to have a number of different approaches, at least in the short-to-middling term. people need time to learn and change, and we should be prepared for a pretty wide spectrum of possible futures over the next decades, centuries–not sure how long.
if we’d recognized the limits we’d eventually face early enough, we’d be all doing that now, and human cultures would be decentralizing and de-complexifying and the population could return to a sustainable level and a healthier lifeway without so much distress and loss.
of course, it seems to be too late for that now–and still, even among people who are concerned and trying to find a way through, we’ve got all this My Way or the Highway, Pal! business. it’s nearly as bad as the Bunker People (you know–the surplus army rations & lots of ammo Mad Max crowd.)
no one has a monopoly on forecasting the *exact* shape and timing of the future. grrr. besides, he really turned me off when he did the whole “go away” thing on you, rather than seeking common ground or *useful* debate.
a shame, really. i’m glad y’all continue to explore and share your own path, and i hope you don’t get *too* caught up in the trap of Point-for-Point negating of someone else’s need to denigrate it (although i do understand your motivation! it isn’t fair to condemn someone without letting them even speak to false or misleading accusations.)
oh–raw garlic is another good systemic antibiotic, by the way! not the pills–just the damn PLANT, you know? : )
Comment by patricia — 21 June 2007 @ 9:29 PM
So-called “Mountain Men” are largely Romantic myths. Anytime that images from the past seem impossible today, that’s generally a good indication that they never actually happened. “Mountain Men” worked for fur companies, and lived extremely regimented, almost military, lifestyles. Moreover, they were also rarely alone; they had mess groups and hunted and trapped in brigades, with a “boosway” (corruption of Bourgeois) as the brigade leader. The sole mountain man living off the land? Largely a Romantic myth, and nothing more. Sure, people can survive alone in the wilderness for some amount of time, but not easily, or well, or for very long.
I’m not so sure; after all, a lot of people did understand this. People have been trying to do that for centuries; they get steamrolled. When energy supplies are increasing, a belief in progress is adaptive; that’s precisely what Catton’s “Age of Exuberance” idea tells us. So, in true animist fashion, things happened the way they happened for a reason and they couldn’t have happened any other way.
Indeed it is!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 9:39 PM
Ok, I have alot of problems with John’s scenario, but this is his story and we must respect that what he’s conveying is in the future, where there are no facts. We must hear him out! If not for the shear entertainment of it. How often have you read a story revolving around post collaspe? I have read only one, from Dr. Carolyn Baker, that I found on “Adapatation”. I was so upset, that I emailed her at once, New Years’s Day morning. A quite “lively” email exchange went through the Rose Parade and into the afternoon. I damned her, point for point, in so much, that she pulled the article, I can find it nowhere. Like an idoit, I’ve lost something that I could build from……………. I learned a damn good lesson there!
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 9:42 PM
Jason, it was no romantic myth when my Great Grandfather settled on the land, I’ll occupy during and after collaspe. He was the first whiteman in the region, and spent the winter alone, in a “teepee”. This man was dumped off a schooner boat, and what he started remains a “dynasty” to this day, over 125 years ago……………… He soon became the doctor, the dentist, employer, judge, undertaker, for all that followed…..Now, you know a little bit more about me, not “grandstanding” here Jason, it’s fact.
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 9:54 PM
Jason, a little off topic here, but I’m watching a 400 pound black bear, fooling around my bird feeders not 30 feet from my couch. I’m viewing this through a 30 ft by 7 ft window wall. Sure wish you were here!!!
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 10:04 PM
Then your great-grandfather was either one of the most exceptional people in history, or the stories that have come down to you have been somewhat embellished. My own ancestors often showed a certain distaste for civilization, usually keeping to its fringes and often living as pioneers. But they didn’t make it by themselves, and I doubt your great-grandfather did either. By modern standards it might almost seem like it, but truly alone? You yourself mention spending the winter alone in his “teepee”—that sure sounds like an implication that he didn’t spend spring, summer or fall that way. And since he’s your great-grandfather, that means his life at least included your great-grandmother and one of your grandparents along the way, doesn’t it? If he then became the doctor, the dentist, an employer, a judge and an undertaker, all of those roles suggest other people around him, don’t they? As I said, my own ancestors lived pioneers’ lives, and often found themselves in similar roles, but they were never alone.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 10:05 PM
What are you wasting time online for then? There’ve been a few times I got to see big, black bears that close, and man, those were some really incredible moments. Get away from the keyboard and live it—tell us about it afterwards.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 10:08 PM
You’re right Jason, a person cannot live alone in the wilderness, not very long, not very far…..
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 10:10 PM
Ha! I ‘ve my little laptop here pulled up next to the couch! ha! Does’nt everbody do it this way? ha!
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 10:13 PM
wait–Jason, are you telling me that Grizzly Adams was not real?! you’ve just destroyed my childhood hero.
but seriously, we no longer have the circumstances or skill-set or, frankly, the *health* to try and follow any One Man Alone in the Hills kind of path, no matter how exaggerated or not the tales today of them may be. we are not those people.
i think when i said “if we’d recognized the limits” i meant to imply that along with that had come the collective wisdom and will to face it…it’s clear that most segments of our society who are in any position to make big decisions or call for large-scale changes, do not wish to do so, for whatever reason (ignorance or greed or stupidity) and hence the steamrolling! so, we’re left as individuals and small groups to do what we can, on our own.
whether things are happening this way for a reason, or not, we are still left with the same set of circumstances. it helps, though, if we can create sense from them.
about the garlic–i self treated a really nasty sinus infection last fall by eating *lots* of raw garlic, raw ginger root, supplemented with some oregano oil and a few pre-made herbal treatments and teas from the co-op. as i *have* a work-dependant “health” plan of course i also went ahead and had the GP prescribe an antibiotic, which i picked up, but never opened. if PGH gets a New Orleans treatment any time in the next year or so, i’ve got something worth trading now, i guess.
i’ve also been working with my mum who caught a nasty, recurring MRSA in Jefferson hospital a few years back–and changing her diet, and adding the right herbs has done her wonders. this would be *after* IV antibiotics in the hospital on several occassions did *not* kick its ass properly. if they’d had her on some herbal tinctures prior to the orginal surgery, she might never have picked it up in the first damn place. they should have predicted she would, given her age, type of surgery, prevalence of those nasty little guys, etc.
now…i’ve just got to back that knowledge up a bit to the point where i can grow/forage the plants, and make my own tinctures!
(and yeah–i already know that my sinus trouble likely was made worse by my inability to give up all wheat and dairy…until i was miserable and sick, and even then when i was over it i still went back. i learn slowly. but i have managed to get off most of the processed garbage and stick mostly to raw and/or fermented dairy, and sprouted or sourdoughed grains. it’s a step in a better direction, at least!)
i’m so bummed i can’t make the survival skills thing this weekend–i assume y’all are still going? can’t wait to hear the tale! i’ll be in D.C. instead…the belly of the beast.
Comment by patricia — 21 June 2007 @ 10:17 PM
Jason, it’s my wishes for us to get to know each other well enough, that you could come here, and experience for yourself some incredible moments…. I’ll take you so far back, you’ll experience what “primitive” means. It’s so beautiful Jason! The furhter, we go back, the more this life’s concerns fade away. Soon, you loose this life and into the natural world and learn to play by it’s rules. This is what truely being “free” is, to me. It’s an experience, you’ll never forget.
Comment by yooper — 21 June 2007 @ 10:25 PM
I’m not so sure. Here in Pennsylvania, the original colony had Quaker leadership. They wanted to deal honestly with the Indians. But they couldn’t; not because the leaders didn’t want to, but because they were part of a system, and the system had to follow its own rules.
Yup, that’s where we’re a-viking. I’ll let Giuli write up the account when we get back.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 June 2007 @ 11:29 PM
good point:
“…not because the leaders didn’t want to, but because they were part of a system, and the system had to follow its own rules.”
i agree. but…how do we change the system then? if the leaders can’t, and the *regular* people can’t? that’s the puzzle. it may be that natural forces beyond anyone’s control will shape things to a great extent, but at some point, human agency must also step forward and join in that dance…or simply be crushed? i don’t know.
enjoy your woodland weekend! i am entirely envious. me and 10,000 some other librarians will be plotting and wooing and in some cases possibly even *occupying* various political venues in D.C., all, most likely, to no avail whatsoever (except perhaps for a false assuaging of our own consciences: “hey–we tried, but no one listened.” pah.)
i’m never as hopeless as i may sound, though! mmmm…Beast Belly…my favorite!
Comment by patricia — 21 June 2007 @ 11:57 PM
woops–make that 26,000 librarians, expected.
Comment by patricia — 22 June 2007 @ 12:00 AM
Jason, I do agree with your thoughts surrounding this article. I can see hugh “holes” that does’nt seem to hold water. The make-shift locomotive, what could be the reasoning behind this? Where is it going and would it be hauling?
I think, John, alludes to a depression like period. This country cannot go through another 1930’s like depression! We cannot afford this! Yup, that’s right, this country cannot afford to go through a depression!
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 6:20 AM
The whole “living alone in the wilderness” subject is one I’ve discussed alot with other primitivists. It often comes down to what one considers “alone” because depending on your definition, there have been plenty of people who have lived quite long and well alone in the wilds. I have heard and read of people who lived for many years (or even decades) alone in the Alaskan bush. These people would live season by season in the wilds personally subsisting on what they alone hunted, fished, and gathered. The only thing is every now and then, they would have to make their way into a settlement. Usually it was for something like ammunition for their rifle. Of course they had to buy the ammuniton so they needed some type of income so most of them were trappers and would sell fur. And of course those steel traps took a beating out there so every now and then, the traps would need to be replaced. This is a relatively common storyline for the lives of some old-time Alaskan trappers. Would you consider that to be alone?
One could argue they weren’t entirely alone in that they still relied on civilization’s (and therefore other people’s) guns and boats or canoes and a few other smaller items like matches and pots for their subsistence. So what would you consider to be “alone”? For these trappers to be truly alone, I suppose, they would have to make and use their own bows and arrows, fishing nets, sleds, etc. Obviously this makes living alone much more difficult.
But to live alone in the wilds with marginal civilizational material like Christopher McCandless had is very do-able. Primitivists(which I am one) like to mention Chris McCandless seemingly as a way to somehow “prove” that it’s nearly impossible to live alone in the wilderness. McCandless was a foolish idiot for running off to the woods without knowledge, experience, and preparation. There have been people who succeeded where McCandless failed, so why is all the focus on him?
Comment by Andy — 22 June 2007 @ 6:24 AM
I would like to submit that whether or not someone can live alone in the wilderness for an indefinite period of time is actually a rather moot point. Granted, it may not be a moot point for the person in question, however, for the human community at large, it very much is. One person does not constitute a culture or community. Humans, no matter how introverted, still need some amount of contact with other humans, and you can safely bet that the preferred amount is going to follow a bell curve. You’ll find a few people that don’t need human contact but once every few years, and you’ll have a few people that always need human contact, most of us are going to be somewhere in the middle. This has nothing to do with skills, technology or anything but simple human behaviour; what it [b]means[/b] to be human.
Garlic, at least, is super easy to grow and requires no more care than planting and harvesting (and curing). You can start w/ mail order garlic cloves, but supermarket garlic works just as well. Around here (OH) the best time to plant seems to be August, but I’ve done pretty well planting all the way up to the end of October. Let them grow for close to a year before harvesting (I generally just harvest in early to mid August). After harvesting, I briefly wash the bulbs, then set them out to dry and “cure” for a few days to a week. Don’t forget to replant.
PS: no tilling is required, if the soil is soft enough, just push the clove in, otherwise a small hole per clove will do just fine and try to give each plant 1 - 2 sq ft of room.
Comment by jhereg — 22 June 2007 @ 9:04 AM
I don’t think you really can—you have to just let it run its course, and there’s very little you can do to stop it, slow it down, speed it up, or change it. It’s a system that operates by its own logic, and it ultimately destroys itself, like a social storm the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Human agency plays the same role it does in a natural disaster: figuring out how to survive it, and then figuring out how to put our lives back together once it’s passed.
Adny, Alaskan trappers typically don’t live by themselves. They live with other trappers in small groups. There might be some, but they’re very rare. McCandless actually did have quite a bit of knowledge and experience. Before his death in 1996, McCandless had been living as a wanderer for six years, under the alias “Alexander Supertramp.” He wasn’t experienced in the Alaskan bioregion, though, and more importantly, he was alone.
But ultimately, jhereg is right. No wild human ever approaches the “wilderness” as something to be faced alone. It’s always about the tribe. Living alone in the “wilderness” is every bit as pathological as living in a crowded city.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2007 @ 9:37 AM
Jason, I had intention to trap, just to explain how impatient youths can interpret the message to abandon civilization, especially when it starts to suck in really obvious ways.
As to the difference between free and alive, very few slaves have the time or opportunity to learn anything at all of which their masters disapprove. And few masters have what it takes to abandon their position for a different life. So, bronze age kingdoms are quite stable in that respect. Not much turn-over.
Comment by _Gi — 22 June 2007 @ 9:40 AM
Your average Bronze Age peasant had vastly more primitive skills than your average urbanite today. They knew the seasons, the plants, and often had to rely on herbal medicines and the like when their families became ill.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2007 @ 9:45 AM
One last word on the ‘living alone in the wilderness’ thread. I’ll try to get some info together on Simon Kenton and post it either on Anthropik’s forums or rewild.info’s forums. I think there’s some people who would be very interested, as it very much relates to this topic.
Comment by jhereg — 22 June 2007 @ 10:05 AM
You are right about this, but they did still have a mindset that was not conducive to disappearing into the wilderness, for one thing, they all did call it wilderness.
Nevertheless, the hapless youths that Greer imagined, are most likely simply fleeing the press gangs the best way they know how.
It all comes to preparation. You wouldn’t want your child pressed into service, so you are making plans to disappear way before this will be an issue.
They did not.
Comment by _Gi — 22 June 2007 @ 11:56 AM
It doesn’t take any great deal of preparation, though. You can learn the basics of identifying wild edible plants in a weekend, and you’ll have a store of plants memorized long before your favorite field guide crumbles. Greer’s primitivists aren’t just unprepared, they’re comically stupid. Just one decent field guide between them, maybe a weekend class on herbal medicines, could’ve avoided that grisly fate. These aren’t just unprepared primitivists, these are primitivists who didn’t want and didn’t even try to prepare.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2007 @ 12:07 PM
Jason, you’re wrong about some of the old-time (and new-time) Alaskan trappers. These people were not the Mountain Men of the early 1800’s who, as you said, lived extremely regimented, almost military, lifestyles and were almost never alone. These were people who did not work for any fur company. They just lived for themselves in the wilderness, and most seemed to enjoy the solitude. Lone Alaskan trappers were not exactly common, but they were definately not as rare as you indicated. There are a bunch of stories out here(I live in Alaska) of guys who ran 100 mile long traplines alone for 20+ years. Some trappers would have a trapping partner. Two seems to be the most common number regarding the number of trappers in a group, but there were plenty of singles. I have found more than a fewl accounts of people living alone in the wilds, and in one of them, the guy actually said it was easy!
Comment by Andy — 22 June 2007 @ 6:50 PM
jhereg, thanks, my thoughts exactly, almost. It’s very interesting that you resembled human contact with a bell shape curve….I disagree, that someone could go for years without other human contact. I strongly agree with you’re statement about “being human”. You stick around, eh?
One of my favorite topics is “curves”. Show me a bell shape curve that resembles anything of this natural world, and it’ll be the first, I’ve seen. I’m about to get very deep into this topic and provide scientific evidence that popualtion decline NEVER follows this pattern.
Yes, I totally agree that living alone in the wilderness is a moot point for the human communtiy at large. Oh, oh, that’s why I’m predicting almost total extinction, here in the U.S..
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 7:11 PM
Andy, you hang around too, eh?! I really like your posts! What Jason, does’nt know is the practical. If he did, we might be hearing a little different story here………………………
However, what Jason does have is knowledge. This is hard to come by, maybe one in a million, has the kind he has. That’s why, I’m sticking around.
I just love Kodiak Island, Alsaska! Very much, one of my favorite places in the world! This island, is a favorite study of mine. When collaspe hits, it would be very interesting if how many would be alive on this island in 6 months. This island can in fact support primitive human life. What an adventure it would be!!!!! In fact, my wife is cozied up with a Kadiak Island blanket, now… If Jason and company could only go there, perhaps, they would realize, what I mean that surviving collaspe would be like climbing Mount Everest! This island, is the size of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with only 19 miles of paved roads, only 89 miles of gravel road. I noticed very, very few homes outside of Kodiak, hmmmm, wonder why?
This is another fact, most people that live on the fringes of society, PERFER it that way. They have learned to adapt. To know the feelings these kind of people enjoy can ONLY be experineced. Period.
Great posts Andy!!!
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 7:44 PM
Thanks, yooper! So you’ve been to Kodiak? I haven’t, but I’ve known people who’ve been there and have seen pictures(definately not like the real thing though).
I’ll take a guess why there aren’t many people outside the city of Kodiak; really huge bears that inhabit the island at 1 bear per square mile! The biggest bears in the world. But there’s also ALOT of blacktail deer and Roosevelt elk on the island(and always the bounty of the sea), so surviving there after collapse would probably be no harder than anywhere else, just more beautiful!
Comment by Andy — 22 June 2007 @ 8:17 PM
Why do you keep assuming that Jason has no primitive skills knowledge? You frequently talk as if you’re the only person here who’s ever even seen a forest. Just because he disagrees with you doesn’t mean he’s ignorant.
Well, in Alaska, maybe. We’re not in Alaska. We’re setting up in Pennsylvania. It’s far more liveable here.
As for your repeated claims as to how incredibly difficult it is to live in the “wilderness,” the Inuit and the !Kung would beg to differ. Human societies have thrived in even the most marginal, inhospitable environments on Earth. This whole discussion of whether or not it’s technically possible to live completely alone as a hunter-gatherer misses the point. Who ever would want to? Humans were designed for tight-knit communities; that’s what we crave, that’s the environment we operate best in. And no matter what the climate, a supportive community always makes it easier to get by.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 22 June 2007 @ 8:21 PM
Yooper, I’m getting really tired of people telling me what I do and don’t know. You have no idea what I know or what my background is, so kindly stop pretending that you do.
jhereg made a great post about the legendary frontiersmen of American myth—none of whom ever lasted more than two years out in the “wilderness” by themselves.
Andy, your Alaskan trappers are still coming down to the towns to sell their furs and get new gear, so they’re not making it on their own by any stretch of the imagination. They may not have a lot of contact with the people they rely on, but they’re relying on quite a few people to help support them.
You’ll pretty much have to, because population decline always follows that pattern. So disproving known historical and ecological facts will be quite a trick.
You’re backing up your assertion that every hunter-gatherer who’s ever lived is wrong that it’s easy, and you’re right that it’s hard, by listing all the assets you have that will make it easier for you? Or do you actually think those are bad things?
And you assume I haven’t. What kind of place do you think Marienville, PA is?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2007 @ 9:17 PM
Jason, back to you. I’m agreeing with much what you’re conveying here, naturally. Now, thinking about it for a day, you kinda caught me off guard about the bear and being on the pc on the same time…. This bear comes here often, as the dozen or so deer, two pairs of sandhill cranes, dozens of squirrels, chippies, woodchuck who’s made his home not 30 feet away from the house and hundreds of birds. Jason, you and I live completely different lives. I want to open my life up to you…………….
I was going to go into my thoughts about “depression”, this can wait. We do have time……However, this is about a much respected investigative writer, who has put his reputation on the line, predicting a “depression” in the second quater of next year……………………….I’ll go into detail about htis tomorro.
What I’d like to convey to you is my dumb mistake, that I’ve been making for years, in hopes that you’ll avoid this. I’ve noticed the Carloyn Baker headline you’ve posted, can’t wait to read it!
I read the posts on BNB for perhaps six months before I posted. This was an extremely intellectual group of people. When I introduced myself, I came on pretty much as I have here with “the prediction.”
I liken this board to a casino, very good card players, laying downs hands, around a table. The best card player left the table when I sat down and stated, “Why do I have to tell him, he must die?” This shook me to the core, never have I been asked such a question, after talking about this to literally thousands of people! I wanted to reply, “well, someone has to tell you this!”. However, this man is on the peak oil circuit, much like James Kunstler. I still, don’t have an answer to him….except see you in the woods! It was little wonder why he folded his cards and left….let me explain…
Soon, we were talking about Kunstler, and I expressed my view, that this man just does’nt, “get it”. I was attacked by just about everyone at the time. However, as I explained that Kunstler is just a writer, making a living from it, that his story has to be plausible, in order for people to “buy it”, however “water down”. In fact, Kunstler has introduced the peak oil theory better than most writers. He is introducing, Peak Oil 101, the beginers class. Most people must go through this stage before they can go deeper into this topic.
What I’m suggesting here Jason, is that you’re offering, “Peak Oil 107″, perhaps for the more advanced students. What you’re trying to convey is for a much advanced bunch of “students”, that is all.
If it were not for John, Kunstler and the like, you’d perhaps have much fewer students in your class. We’re trying to win souls here to the idea, right? I don’t like it, any better than you, but, people cannot accept the strong message we’re both conveying without being “soften” first. Remember, Hanson’s last post………..
Again, Jason, I want you to know, that I really respect what you’re doing here! My best wishes! I don’t like “smooth talk” or suger coating, it may confuse some people.
For not doing that, I actually, admire you.
For one, I cannot meet my maker, and not have told the truth, in what I actually believe. I’m not a writer, and I’m delivering my message to you and those listening ,of my own accord.
Thanks again Jason! To you and you’re whole tribe! Yooper.
Waiting to hear from other tribal members, especially, Giulianna. Please, do not be affraid of me, I’m very much like the “Grizzely Adam” type.
That goes for anyone on these posts, if you have any questions to ask me, please feel free to ask them. I’ll give the shirt of my back for anyone who asks…..Thank you all.
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 9:54 PM
Giulianna, it’s quite simple, I know, been there, done that. It’s really simple for me to see who has’nt!!!!!!~!!!
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 9:59 PM
Giulianna, you don’t talk to me in that matter, I take offense…I’ve been nice here. I know where the bear shits in the woods, do you?
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 10:03 PM
Wow! maybe I’m somewhere I shoud’nt be? I’m sorry for everything…I won’t be back.
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 10:11 PM
Andy, to answer your question, there’s no water. whoa, eh? I’ll be looing fror you elsewhere…………….
Comment by yooper — 22 June 2007 @ 10:50 PM
That’s some nerve getting all offended and storming off, yooper. You should know that the minute you start telling someone online, whom you’ve never so much as met, what they know or what they don’t know, how they’ve lived their life, and what kind of experience they have, you’ve crossed an important line.
The small, rural towns along the Allegheny National Forest’s edge that I’ve been visiting every summer weekend since I was knee-high have precisely that kind of attitude you’re talking about. I’ve stood mere feet away from deer, turkey and black bear. I’ve chopped wood, tended fires, gathered wild edibles, made poultices to treat cuts and stings, the whole shibang. As a child, I wove primitive shelters by weaving tree limbs together without even realizing what I was doing at the time. I’ve followed tracks up there since I was six, and I know where the natural springs are—that’s how we got our water. But I also don’t see much point in bragging about such basic fluency, which is why I haven’t had much to say about it. Don’t mistake silence for ignorance; as Mark Twain put it, “‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”
I don’t fancy myself any expert outdoorsman. I’m acutely aware of how far I still have to go. But I’ve done a hell of a lot more than you give me credit for. Now you’re going to throw a classic online temper tantrum because somebody dared to point out to you just how incredibly offensive you’re being? I think if anyone’s going to be pissed off here, it should be the one that you’ve been condescending to.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 June 2007 @ 11:10 PM
Jason, you seem to be annoyed of my little “Alaskan trappers” series, so I ‘ll try not to bring them up again.
In my original post (on #24), I asked you the question: What would you consider to be “alone”? That question is what that post was mainly about. Because depending on what one means by “alone”, there have been plenty of people who have done it.
In your last comment to me you said: “Andy, your Alaskan trappers are still coming down to the towns to sell their furs and get new gear, so they’re not making it on their own by any stretch of the imagination. They may not have a lot of contact with the people they rely on, but they’re relying on quite a few people to help support them.” That answered exactly what I asked you in my first post. You don’t believe the trappers were truly alone because of their reliance on civilization.
And by the way, I said essentially the same thing in my first post: “One could argue they weren’t entirely alone in that they still relied on civilization’s (and therefore other people’s) guns and boats or canoes and a few other smaller items like matches and pots for their subsistence. So what would you consider to be “alone”? For these trappers to be truly alone, I suppose, they would have to make and use their own bows and arrows, fishing nets, sleds, etc. Obviously this makes living alone much more difficult.”
So we’re actually in agreement. I don’t believe the trappers were truly alone either. So by both of our definition, even Christopher McCandless wasn’t alone (just ALMOST alone), and he still bit the dust. Kind of a moron in my book.
Comment by Andy — 23 June 2007 @ 7:23 AM
You’re right, Jason. I owe both you and Giulianna, an apology. I’m sorry. I do have quite a few character flaws, jsut ask my wife! My nature is very intimidating and abrasive. My communication skills are horrendous. Again, I’m sorry.
Jason, you just really rubbed me the wrong way on the “mountain man series”, however, I’m in agreement, with what you’re conveying here.
Is it my diseased imgination or did you not imply, that you have never attempted, say a three month period alone in the wilderness? You can’t compare your weekend camping excursions along the edge of the Allengheny National forest, to this…..This is like comparing flight on flight simulators to actual flying.
Long periods of isolation does have it’s effect on the brain, for example. One must over come these “demons” to actually survive under these conditions.
Jason, you’re right, I have no right to assume anything about you or you’re experience. From now on, I’ll just assume that you know and have experienced, such things.
Thanks, yooper.
Comment by yooper — 23 June 2007 @ 10:23 AM
My great uncle lived off the land in Kane, PA. He trapped, foraged, and had fairly extensive organic gardens…But he struggled in his 80’s to continue being self-sufficient. He no longer would take the long walks to town, so our family brought him extra foodstuff’s a few times a year.
But I was always impressed as a young child that this 80+year old man could survive with little outside help. I only wish now that he was around to pass down his knowledge now that I’m older…so much lost experience.
There are many visions for the future, and likely many variations for how things will enfold. Although I’m a fan of horticulture, I can’t see why primitivism is viewed by Greer so negatively…It’s very possible to borrow from both.
Comment by Bubba — 23 June 2007 @ 10:58 AM
Hell, I don’t see them as remotely exclusive of each other. I really think a combination of horticulture, foraging & hunting is going to be the most flexible strategy for the decade, beyond that, it’s hard to tell. Maybe some of the horticulture could slide a bit, not sure.
Comment by jhereg — 23 June 2007 @ 12:46 PM
Greer’s seemingly irrational hatred of primitivism is making more sense to me as I’ve been mulling it over recently. He is the grand poobah of a religion that cannot exist independent of agriculture. The “cyclical narrative” of so-called earth-based religions is the story of planting and harvest, and is based on Earth only to the extent that crops are dependent upon rain, sun, dirt, and summer. The sabbats are time markers signifying which agricultural activities occur at various points during the year, and their celebrations, artifacts, and deities serve the almost exclusive purpose of ensuring a successful growing season. Greer has tied his religious hierarchical position to agriculture more explicitly than possibly anyone else in the world; anything that questions the wisdom of agriculture is a direct threat to that position.
I think that is why he insists on blurring the distinctions between permaculture, horticulture, gardening, forest gardening, etc., and full-scale farming. Paganism requires planting and harvest; it is the original farming religion. If the unsustainable farming methods that gave rise to paganism must be discarded, then paganism will have to appropriate any sort of deliberate planting in order to justify its own existence. The farming liturgy and rubric must be expanded to include even the most rudimentary seed-scattering, otherwise the hierarchy collapses. Which seems to be, interestingly enough, Greer’s fundamental point of contention with the so-called “apocalypse narrative” — as long as planting occurs, pagan hierarchy, a.k.a. civilization, will continue, and there will be no apocalypse.
Primitivism also threatens Greer’s position as a matter of plain competition. People are attracted to neopagan religions, in general, because they feel inspired by nature in some way and are seeking to incorporate it more fully into their lives; and among neopaganisms, druidry has the reputation of being the most intellectually rigorous. If people below him in the religious hierarchy discover an intellectually robust way of being even closer to nature than druidry provides, his organization may dwindle. People genuinely seeking reintegration with nature have no need of an earth-based religion predicated on the separation of planting from nature, and no need of a grand poobah to govern it. I think that’s why he felt he had to silence you, Jason. The stakes are much higher for him than simply losing an online argument — for him, his blog is quite literally a pulpit from which he addresses not only the public, but also his flock. If AODA members are swayed by your arguments, his job might get outsourced to trees, rivers, birds and bears.
I also can’t help but think that there is an element of religious bigotry in Greer’s behavior. Hatred of Christianity, and southwest Asian monotheism more generally, is practically a sacrament in neopaganism. I might be reading into Greer’s writing what isn’t there, but I personally get the feeling he thinks the Judeo-Christian tradition has nothing whatsoever to offer in any circumstance or context — certainly not something so vital as the original, intended narrative for western civilization. I think it’s possible, to some degree, that he’s rejecting primitivism on the grounds that it is fundamentally Christian without recognizing that Christianity and paganism differ only in their number of deities and scales of conquest. They are essentially the same agricultural religion.
Comment by Paula — 23 June 2007 @ 1:28 PM
Hey Paula.
” Paganism requires planting and harvest; it is the original farming religion. If the unsustainable farming methods that gave rise to paganism must be discarded, then paganism will have to appropriate any sort of deliberate planting in order to justify its own existence.”
Heh. I’m one of the coordinators for Pagan Pride Day, run public rituals AND was heavily featured in a Pagan-friendly documentary.
I read your post & had to laugh.
You’re absolutely RIGHT!!!
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the “But I respect the Great Mother. I love Gaea and listen to all things natural” even as they continue to practice agricultural rites that have no connection to their ecosystem and perpetuate the myths of an unsustainable system (”John Barleycorn will rise again!”).
The only thing I can comment on is that animists get lumped under the ‘pagan’ blanket as well, so your comments are mostly true but not entirely true. Meh. We’re talking small word-quibbles.
I don’t know Greer specifically, but seeing that I’m going to go stomping around in his neck of the woods this August (Ashland, OR), I figure I’ll invite him down for a talk just to meet the neighbors.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 23 June 2007 @ 11:23 PM
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Bill… calm down… that would take some planning.
Remember that Urban Scout may very well show, and there would be all sorts of vehement disagreement between Herr Peter and Der Druid… It wouldn’t surprise me at all if things came to blows… And when Willem jumps in, and Archy calls up some Ents or whatever, things could get ugly.
So, we need to make sure we sell tickets, and have a good video camera available…
Planning, my friend. Planning.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 24 June 2007 @ 12:11 AM
You folks are joking right?
In nothing I read over at The Archdruid Report did I get the impression that he held any hatred for anything, not even primitivism. The entire issue seemed to be with Jason’s inability to see that he was dealing with issues a level above Jason’s crusade to turn the world to primitivism. The fact that Jason kept returning to insist that the discussion be about primitivism must have driven him off the deep end, I know it would me.
I’ve read everything Mr Greer has over there and never once has he advocated Druidry as “the way” (except perhaps in a particular article directly addressed to other druids), in fact many comments he has made indicate that he actively avoids bringing it into his writings there, so your arguments that he attacks primitivism out of some desire to save his religion are plainly groundless. Mr Greer has never advocated any particular concrete method of approaching the future over another, it is your own vested interest and fears that make you see such a thing.
As for the following statement:
Primitivism, according to the definition minted by Jason, also allows for planting and harvesting. If anyone has spent time blurring distinctions and definitions it’s the fellow so highly esteemed here who has managed to rephrase the modern understanding of all aspects of modern food production in order to cherry pick what is acceptable for his “religion” and toss the rest into the “to be denigrated” bin. This is admittedly only as far as people outside the US understand things, because everyone within the borders of the US defines things as Jason does, according to Jason, which is fair enough I guess.
If ever there was a straw man, this whole druid bashing thing is it. The entire point of Mr Greer’s objections to Jason’s posts has been missed in favour of a more useful “understanding” of events that bears little relationship to reality.
I’m not an Archdruid supporter as such, I’m not affiliated with his religion, but I am interested in how humanity is going to survive into the future, so I get about checking out peoples’ ideas.
I’m actually in the thick of it attempting to provide my family with food in a sustainable fashion, so whilst I’m not a broadacre agriculturalist, I’ve a fair understanding of what agriculture can achieve in terms of supporting humanity. I know broadacre farmers, and I know orchardists and other horticulturalists so I don’t think I’m out of touch in that respect. I also know many people who practice permaculture, and all of them, as far as I can determine, are more firmly set in the farming camp than the wandering-monkey-who-is-allowed-to-dig-and-plant-and-prune-and-harvest-but-cannot-be-called-an-agriculturalist one.
If anyone needs some good advice it is he who can see but one path into the future. Mr Greer on the other hand has readily acknowledged (and even celebrated) that there will be many paths, including primitivism.
I like to invest in the sustainable future of humanity, so there is 2 cents toward your cause, spend it wisely
Comment by Geoff — 24 June 2007 @ 5:02 AM
Hatred is a pretty strong word, and I’d be loathe to use it. However, Greer does seem to have a certain “distaste” for primitivism that has little to nothing to do with Jason or Jason’s arguements.
I’m not convinced that’s the case. I’m familiar with Greer’s “narrative” rhetoric, and I find it utterly underwhelming. I’m not saying that narratives aren’t useful (they are), simply that the “narrative” that Greer seems to be peddling is as far from being a useful narrative to humanity as I can imagine.
Even when Jason brought the discussion to the level of narrative, Greer still wasn’t interested and behaved poorly.
I suspect that Greer is actually on the level of “meta-narrative” rather than narrative proper, but seems unable (or unwilling) to make that distinction. “Meta-narrative” is also useful, but not as a narrative. It’s only use is in [b]fashioning[/b] narratives, [b]not[/b] as a narrative itself.
I’ve got to say, I’m getting pretty god damned sick and f***ing tired of the phrase “cherry-picking” as relates to facts used in a debate. It’s hand waving. It’s meaningless.
Jason pulls a great deal from anthropology. I don’t see anything wrong with that. If druidry can bring something to this discussion (and I don’t doubt that it can), I don’t see why anthropology can’t as well. Anthropology has pretty well defined meanings for all of this and Jason tries to stay within them whenever possible. I’ve noticed that lately he’s trying to take those definitions and work them into something that people in North America can more intuitively grasp. I see nothing about any of this that constitutes:
Now, moving on to…
First off, realize that people posting here about Greer mostly all have their own reasons for doing so. It’s very poor judgement to assume that we all have the same beefs.
For my part, I was a little frustrated with trying to get to the “meat” of Greer’s issues, but I wasn’t actually pissed off at the man until he deleted Jason’s post and insinuated it was because Jason called Greer a Nazi. [b]If[/b] Jason actually [b]had[/b] called Jason a Nazi, that would be one thing, but I read the post before it was deleted, and no such claim was made. This is a completely dishonorable tactic that has no place whatsoever in an honest debate. I’ve mostly withheld from bashing JMG about it, but at this point, I think it’s important to get something straight:
John Michael Greer is [b]not[/b] interested in having an open discussion
John Michael Greer [b]is[/b] emotionally and intellectually invested in [b]something[/b], even if I’m still not quite sure what it is.
I think part of the disagreement here is really about timelines. Jason has often said that lifeways other than primitivism will exist, but the stance he takes is that they’ll taper off considerably and on a fairly quick timescale. JMG, on the other hand takes the position that other lifeways will be viable for quite sometime. I think this is an often overlooked portion of their disagreements, which is unfortunate, because I think it would help clarify their respective stances considerably for those on the sidelines.
Comment by jhereg — 24 June 2007 @ 10:31 AM
Thanks jhereg, I appreciate the reasoned and reasonable response to what was a bit of a tirade. The word “hatred” gets me going when applied in the fashion it was.
I think that is perfectly acceptable, after all his blog seems to be about preserving the best aspects of civilisation over the coming dark times, and primitivism seems to have a goal that distinctly excludes this.
As for:
I’d like to present the following points made by Jason:
Adam’s Story
Adam’s Story
And yet here we are today with a “primitivism” that now encompasses growing food… that’s a pretty adaptable (read ephemeral) argument IMO. Perhaps I need glasses, but everything seems blurry to me (might be too much beer last night too
)
First off, realize that people posting here about Greer mostly all have their own reasons for doing so. It’s very poor judgement to assume that we all have the same beefs.
Not so much poor judgement, perhaps those that aren’t druid-bashing per se are not included within the scope of my comment.
He didn’t call him a Nazi, but he did compare the viewpoints/arguments in that fashion, and I believe the response given was perfectly justified given that:
As far as I can see it, he did discuss primitivism at length, and was open to doing so. I can also see that he wasn’t interested in having an endlessly ongoing “open” discussion of the merits of primitivism, which is fair enough given the focus of his blog.
Seems to me that it’s civilisation, without the currently attendant industrialisation, all summed up in the headline:
“Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society”
Primitivism doesn’t seek to preserve the aspects of society that seem to be valuable to Mr Greer (as I interpret them, which is wholly my interpretation, and may not actually apply to him at all), which essentially rules it out as a solution, so why bother debating it at such length? Seems a sensible response to me, any solution to a problem must give you the results you want or it’s not an acceptable solution is it?
Comment by Geoff — 24 June 2007 @ 7:35 PM
I’m sure long periods of isolation is incredibly damaging to the brain. That’s because humans weren’t meant to be alone. So why would you ever want to try to fight that, to “overcome” that basic human need that you percieve to be a “demon”? Why would any of us ever want to do that alone? Jason and I both strongly believe that the tribe is the basic building block of human life: that no human should ever be alone, that we all need, crave, and deserve a mutually supportive community.
This “mountain man” discussion rests on the assumption that man should be alone, that it’s healthy for man to be all alone with no other human contact. This is nothing more than American Romanticism - the false ideal of the “rugged individualist” that our culture tells us we must all become. This ideal is killing us all. It tells us never to show any weakness by getting too close to anyone else, or relying on anyone for help. It isolates us. It drives us crazy. We need more human community, and deeper human community, not less. When we go off into the woods, it should be as an already-functioning community of humans that’s extending its web of mutual support to the ecology.
So no, he’s never spent three months in the woods, all alone, with no other humans. Why in God’s name would he want to?
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 24 June 2007 @ 8:57 PM
One of the problems of looking back at what people did in history is that we are looking back from where we are standing now. It is very difficult to remove onself from the mindset of what we have today, I know I have tried unsuccessfully.
As for the mountain man. There have always been solitaire hunters and explorers. The Daniel Boone of lore. The Scotch Irish were well known for wanting to live on the other side of civilization. THe Mountain Men of our lore sort of started on the return of the Lewis & Clark expedition when either Glass or Colter went back up the river as guides before even returning to St Louis. For the next almost 40 years is when the image of the Mountain Man and the yearly Rendezvous developed. They were solitary, often marrying into an Indian tribe. They solitary trapper mostly trapped his own skins as the Indians quickly learned they could get better prices at the Rendezvous.
Before that was the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company in Canada. They did have a regimented system with leaders and factors but they mostly traded with Natives until later in the era when there were enough to set out trapping brigades. They lived a regimented life of hard dangerous work.
The part we forget is that many came from a life just as hard and dangerous. Farm boys of the time all knew how to live off the land and the Mountain men quickly learned Indian methods to augment their own skills. The Voyagers of the Canadian companies came from the same backgrounds. To all of them is was not a romantic vision of slender in the mountains but just another way to earn a living.
As a quick aside to see which trappers were predominant in an area, look at early place names. The Canadian trappers were mostly traders so set up “houses” in good areas where natives could bring in furs for trade goods. The more solitary Mountain Men built forts for protection of goods and themselves. For example there in Spokane House established by the HBC and Fort Spokane established by the independent trappers. Spokane House was a favorite over wintering location because it was not far from the less regimented Fort Spokane and its free flowing liquor.
Stepping back even farther we must remember that the bronze age started several thousand years after the start of agriculture. Again, the citizens of the small city states of the time still knew many of the skills of their HG fore bearers. Also remember the reason for towns and cities was protection. HG tribes have always understood the carrying capacity of their territory and have kept interlopers out. To venture into anothers territory could mean death or capture into slavery. You could not necessarily just walk a few miles over the hills to freedom.
Comment by Don — 24 June 2007 @ 11:11 PM
Don, is strongly agree with you’re post, especially the carrying capacity of the land. I’m strongly suggesting that much of the land in the lower 48 states cannot support a fraction the amount of people as it could, say 100 years ago.
Guilanna, thank you, for your thoughtful response. I suppose, under my collaspe sceniaro, isloation from civilization would be the number one requirement, if one, two or groups of people are to survive. The emotions people can expect to have under such conditions happens whether one is alone or with a group of people.
It’s a painful experience, (even for me), everytime, the further I go back, the longer I stay, as the layers of plastic are peeled back. This is like cutting you’re strings tied to society. For me, it’s quite the “free fall”, like jumping off a cliff and into “unknown waters”, each and every time.
I’m going to pull back for awhile. Good luck, to you, Jason and the whole tribe. For many, many people, this tribal thing may be the only way, isolation can be achieved.
Thanks, yooper.
Comment by yooper — 25 June 2007 @ 6:34 AM
A lot here to respond to, so I’ll break it up a bit. First, wrapping up the “mountain man” tangent from #44-45:
“Alone” would be to live full years at a time, out in the woods, with all of your needs provided by yourself. So an Alaskan trapper who comes into town to buy ammunition once a year fails on two criteria: he doesn’t spend even a single year alone, and he doesn’t support himself by his own efforts, he needs bullets and resources provided by other people. He may not see them very often, but his way of life needs other people to help support him. Which was very much my original point, which yooper said, “Jason, you are wrong! Some humans can survive alone in the wilderness!!!!! How do you account for the mountain men? This is’nt some fantasy, it’s fact.” Well, in fact, the “mountain men” were largely fantasy, not fact. Sorry if you got caught in the crossfire of my irritation, though. It does seem we’re largely agreed.
Yooper, it’s less your ability to communicate than what you’re communicating that you really need to watch. No, I’ve never spent even a few months out in the wilderness. Never had the opportunity yet, but I’d like to. And I don’t fancy myself any kind of great outdoorsman. But you’ve been assuming a lot less than I am, and been quite condescending about it. I have some idea of what’s involved. I’m fully aware of how much farther I have to go, but don’t talk down to me like I’ve never so much as seen a bear in the woods before. I’m a little further along than that.
But as Giuli pointed out, I don’t think isolation is healthy, so I don’t plan on ever spending that much time in the woods alone. But I will be spending a lot more time, as time goes on, out there with my tribe.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 10:42 AM
#46-50:
Bubba, that’s pretty incredible, and just north from my own home along the Tuppeek-hanne.
Jhereg, that’s true. Right now, permaculture will help us improve our chances drastically. When things start to turn, hunting and gathering will be more adaptable. But show me a hunter-gatherer who doesn’t do a bit of gardening, or a horticulturalist who doesn’t hunt.
Paula, that’s about the size of it, I think. Greer says he has no narrative; that’s always a conceit. We all have narratives. If you think you don’t have one, then you’re the most dogmatic of all, because you can’t even recognize it as a narrative—for you, it has become the unquestionable truth. The very fact that Greer has actually said that he doesn’t have a narrative confirms much of what you say as far as I’m concerned, Paula. I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way, but that’s just because he can’t even see that his narrative is a narrative anymore. I’ve been in that position before, and it’s a terrible place to be.
Bill, that’s why I always squirm a bit when animism gets pulled under “neo-paganism.” Neo my ass, this is the real old-time religion, dammit! Just because it isn’t Christian doesn’t make it pagan.
Chuck, fortunately, Scout’s in PA this week.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 11:04 AM
#51
Geoff, you and I must be reading entirely different websites. Does Greer run another blog called “The Archdruid Report” that I don’t know about? You wrote this bit of fantasy:
So let’s review, from the current “Previous Posts” list on the Archdruid Report:
So, I agree, primitivism doesn’t seem particularly germane to the subjects Greer says he’s writing about. So why does he write about primitvism so much? And if he’s going to be writing a weekly column on how stupid we are, why aren’t we permitted to respond?
You can’t really be that short-sighted, can you? No, Greer doesn’t advocate druidry as “the way,” but he absolutely has a vested interest, and a bias that drives his vision. He may not think of it in those terms, but surely on some level, this constant, weekly tirade against primitvism, and the temper tantrum he throws when we stand up to defend ourselves, is rooted in the fact that we’re a threat to him. Most of what he writes is about how stupid we are. At least all I’ve written is just one part of Anthropik’s schedule. Most of the time, we’re writing about other things. But since there’s a widely-distributed, weekly tirade circulating about how stupid we are, and we’re not allowed to comment on the articles about how much primitivism sucks (since that would be derailing the conversation into being about primitivism, and not how much it sucks), we’ve got to make our stand somewhere. I’m tired of the regular, weekly attack, and no possibility for response.
That’s not my minting. Horticultural tribes are called “primitive” as quickly as hunter-gatherers. Think of your “primitive” tribes in the Amazon; all horticulturalists. Who hesitates to call the Yanomamö “primitive”? They’re horticulturalists. I didn’t invent the usage, I just figured out a way in which it makes sense.
I’m not exactly highly esteemed, but we can go back to the agriculture vs. horticulture thread if you want to hash this out some more. Nothing I’ve used has been cherry-picked or rephrased. It’s etymologically, historically, and technically correct. What’s pure obfuscation is to use the Latin for tilling, a word that is set in everyone’s minds as tilled monocropping, and means, technically, tilled monocropping, to describe plainly horticultural techniques that involve neither tilling nor monocropping. At that point, you’re introducing intentional obfuscation with the explicit purpose of confusing people. From the way you’ve justified it, I’d guess that it’s mostly motivated by maintaining the farmers’ control of the food supply. You don’t want the non-farming majority to understand what you’re talking about, so that farmers can maintain a stranglehold on where our food comes from; I’m guessing you are a farmer, and that would probably be why? But the fact remains, I’m using these terms in an etymologically and technically correct fashion. You’re reinventing them, and extending “agriculture” to cover every kind of cultivation ever practiced. By the definitions you’ve made up, what is the difference between “agriculture” and “cultivation”?
Do people in England refer to backyard gardens as “farms”? Do they call themselves “farmers” if they have a garden? How many people in England walk through a rain forest, and comment on what a lovely farm it is?
It was Englishmen who failed to recogize the vast forest gardens cultivated by horticultural tribes, identical to the permacultural forest gardens we’re experimenting with today. So it’s not just a U.S. thing. It’s an English definition, as in, the language. Certainly it was not in the U.S. that the word first formed in Latin, referring specifically to tilling. All I’ve done is follow through the consequences of the definitions that have been known, used and agreed upon for millennia.
Greer’s objection is just that we’re an apocalyptic cult–which we’re not, anymore than Greer is a Nazi.
99% of “sustainable agriculture” isn’t. Demonstrably so. If you’re doing a permacultural food forest, you’re probably doing something sustainable. You’re also doing something that no one would ever call a farm, just like all the Englishmen who tromped through the Amazon commenting on how the miserable natives had no agriculture.
Primitivism isn’t one path. Primitivism is everything that isn’t in cities. It’s 99% of human cultural diversity. It’s what we lump into “everything that isn’t like us.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 11:35 AM
#53
Which would be fine, if he actually didn’t write about primitivism. But every week, every article is primarily about how primitivists are all idiots. If he doesn’t want primitivists responding, and if that isn’t what his blog is about, maybe he should occasionally write about something else? This past week’s story was the first time in over a month that primitivist stupidity was not the primary topic of the article of the week.
Look at the cultures that have been deemed “primitive.” It really means very little besides, “not civilized,” and civilization is an extremely narrow and homogeneous form of human society. So we took our particular way of life, and called that “civilization,” and everything else is “primitive.” Our particular way of cultivating is “agriculture,” and everything else is “horticulture.” Cultivation is one subsistence strategy, and everything else is “hunting and gathering.” This is fairly typical ethnocentrism, and precisely the kind of distinctions you’d expect a culture to make, but it hardly makes for a useful taxonomy. “Civilization” vs. “Primitive” is one type of society, versus thousands of thousands of diferent types of societies.
These aren’t terms I came up with, these are the terms as we have them in English, with all their ethnocentric baggage. But that’s good, in a way, because the most pressing crises we face are unique to our particular way of life, so it’s handy to have a word that means “everything else.” The trap, of course, is when people mistake “primitive” to be a specific way of life, and not “every other way of life.”
And what about comparing someone to David Koresh, or Jim Jones? What about his weekly comparison of us to an apocalyptic cult? That’s so much more high-minded? It’s not perfectly justified. Greer (1) is misrepresenting Godwin’s Law, and (2) misrepresenting what I said. His arguments are as comparable to Nazism as mine are to an apocalyptic cult. With sufficient hand-waving, you can create that illusion, but only by ignoring key, essential details. I don’t think you can really compare Greer to a Nazi. That would be a sloppy, irresponsible comparison that would rightfully draw cries of outrage and indignation. Just like Greer’s weekly comparison of me and other primitivists to an assortment of apocalyptic cults.
I don’t think I ever got a single straight answer out of him, which is a shame, because I doubt we have much substantive differences and could probably work together if he weren’t so committed to this zealous crusade to bring down primitivism.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 11:49 AM
#55-56
The Scots-Irish lived in clans, not alone. And Daniel Boone never spent more than 2 years alone.
How can one be solitary, and marry into an Indian tribe?
They did. But not solitary. And you do know that Indians are people, right? You can’t be solitary, and dealing with Indians all the time.
You actually could, and there are plenty of mentions from contemporary accounts of such things, but you couldn’t walk into someone else’s territory. You had to go where no territory was claimed, which, once upon a time, was fairly easy to find. That was before the “closing of the map.”
Based on … what?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 11:57 AM
Several comments:
The Daniel Boone of lore is not the Daniel Boone of history.
Guides for whom? The very idea of being guides implies a plethora of contact with others, not isolation.
So they weren’t solitary, they were hanging out with the locals. To say that marrying natives is solitary is ethnocentrism at its finest.
Forts were not built by individuals, they were built by groups. An individual has no need for a fort.
Certianly, in our legends of the European expansion to the west we honour those who went beyond the frontier. But in reality, it would have been incredibly foolish to have gone alone. How many people set out with Lewis and Clarke? How many people helped them along the way? How many people made it back?
Comment by JimFive — 25 June 2007 @ 12:00 PM
Exactly, Jim. This whol tangent is just an exercise in Romantic claptrap, and the fact that we still celebrate such anti-human nonsense is precisely the reason that so many people run off into the woods and get themselves killed, like McCandless. We celebrate these images as role-models, as if isolation in the wilderness was somehow a good thing. To quote Quinn again:
The very ideal is folly. An isolated human out in the wilderness is every bit as pathological as your most earnest city-dweller.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 June 2007 @ 12:06 PM
The post I made was primarily concerned with what appears to be a bit of a
persecution complex, something that I just cannot see within the primary posts
over at Mr Greer’s blogs. There is so little difference between the goals that
both ideologies have that it seems silly to be saying he is evincing “hatred” for
primitivism when this just does not seem to be the case.
Out of the 5 posts you reference, 4 of which you refer to as being direct assaults
on primitivism (those 4 set against some 14 months of posting on various subjects)
only Adam’s Story: Twilight in Learyville
makes direct reference to primitivism, and that just 10% of the narrative. Even that
reference is couched in terms that would lead the general reader to understand that
it is ignorant people going to their doom, which is entirely valid. It is a fact that
any movement will attract some people who have no idea and run off to certain doom.
As for the other posts, as I read them they seemed to make no attack on primitivism at all, and
equally referred to my own beliefs as much as to any primitivist. My own narratives are
essentially apocalyptic, and I read the posts in those terms. It may be a case of
seeing an enemy where none exists perhaps? The comments may have turned to primitivism but I
think that is more to do with the observer influencing the outcome than anything else.
Are you sure?
Those “wild humans” would be primitivists, yes?
This may be the case, but over here (in oz) we have a “Department of Agriculture” that deals with all forms
of cultivation of the Earth, indeed all forms of food production. We also have
Bachelor Degrees in Horticulture that deal with landscape gardening, turf maintenance for
sports fields, vineyard management etc. Agriculture classes taught in high schools don’t limit
themselves to covering only monocrop tilling, they cover the whole range. People from the cities
regularly undertake these in order to receive the knowledge contained within them,
so they are being educated en masse under a totally different comprehension of these things
than you indicate they should have.
That’s a bit nasty
I’m actually on an acre practicing a hybrid of permaculture,
horticulture/orcharding and tilling the earth to grow vegetables and staples. I’m also
an ardent (one might say rabid) believer in the fact that we
should do everything we can to bring food production home again. The likes of the
big agribusiness corporations that wish to patent food species and constrain
food production to the select few are the antithesis of civilisation IMO.
Do you believe there is a chance of a brighter future after peak oil (peak everything) and the decline of
industrialisation? I do, so I guess that makes me a proud, dyed in the wool apocalyptic. I can comfortably
examine that as a narrative without feeling ill, primarily because I heartily believe that
the current state of society is not good. Believing in a brighter future after the darkness to
come suits me fine and keeps me sane.
Here is the crux of our definitional crisis. In our (meaning my, though I don’t own them) circles, when
we say “sustainable agriculture” we mean the things that you don’t. Sustainable farming, sustainable
agriculture are one and the same to us, and they are not monocropping. We call them farms and they’re for growing food.
As for being demonstrably unsustainable, that’s just not the case (yet?), though, again, our sustainable farms
may be sustainable as long as we call them primitively managed landscapes or whatever.
It’s not everything that isn’t in cities. I live in a rural village, certainly no city,
and I live a civilised life, not a primitive one, or at least like to think I do, though the
city relatives tend to think otherwise.
I’m not so much concerned with definitions of what made a culture “primitive” in the past, but with what
your particular movement, advocating taking up “primitivism”, deems to be a “primitive” way of
life suitable for the future.
f that “primitivism” means I can live in my house, work the gardens and mini-orchard
), forge a bit of metal, read some books from the library, drink the
(my “farmlet”
aged wine from the cellar, then all is well and good. These are the trappings of a “civilised” life
as far as I see it, and then really there is no distinction between the two ideologies. If there
is a distinction, then what is it? How does it differ?
I just cannot see this crusade in his writing, as I’ve said at the start. As for straight answers, I don’t think the
universe allows for such things, except where one carefully defines a limited
environment and set of rules, but we’re not all mathematicians, are we?
Comment by Geoff — 25 June 2007 @ 9:39 PM
For the most part, no. Primitivists are people who believe that a primitive lifestyle is better, but you don’t need to be a primitivist to live primitively. Here, we frequently discuss how primitivist approaches pop up among distinctly non-primitivist groups, simply because they work so well. Most people who survive won’t pursue primitive lifestyles actively; they’ll fall into them, simply because they work better.
Further, I distinguish between “wild humans,” as indigenous and prehistoric primitive societies, versus “domesticated humans” like us, and “feral humans,” which is what we can become. The experience of domestication leaves some permanent scars, so we can never simply turn the clock back and pretend civilization never happened. Feral life can’t just disregard the domesticated past; it brings with it a need to deal with that legacy, and syncretic approaches towards a new, creative synthesis.
And here in the U.S., the Department of Agriculture include the U.S. Forest Service and all of our national forests. That’s something most Americans don’t know, and are generally shocked to learn, because they would never think of a national forest as having anything to do with agriculture. I don’t think the grasping of government agencies looking for more power really has much to do with how people understand words, much less where those words come from.
Again, where else would they fit? It seems silly, from a school’s point of view, to split off a whole new school for these things. It’s all growing things, right? So they shoehorn them under the same category no matter how different they are. One of the reasons I went to Pitt rather than CMU was that CMU had a single department of Sociology & Anthropology. Does that mean that sociology and anthropology are the same? Not at all. It just means that the administrative distinctions of a school tells you where a school’s priorities lie, not in what the words mean.
That’s true, I got a little carried away. I apologize.
And here’s the real crux of my problem. Yes, I see potential here for a much improved quality of life, since the ascent was marked with significantly lower quality of life all along the way. Apparently, you, too, see a silver lining on this looming cloud. By Greer’s analysis, that makes us exactly the same as Jim Jones, David Koresh, or the Aum Shinrikyo. The logic is, “Your narrative is somewhat similar, so I’ll pick the absolute worst representatives to stand in for all of you, and then dismiss you on those grounds.” That’s not a logical argument. If I were to apply that logic to him, we’d come up with the Nazis, and just as many parallels between them as he can find between me and Koresh, or you and Jim Jones. Both are flimsy, illogical, irrational arguments. Neither one addresses what the person is actually saying; both are mere dismissals, and neither one is deserved.
Do we have certain elements in common? Of course! I wrote about that in October 2005, more than six months before there even was an Archdruid Report. But I also said:
Which is a level of sophistication in the analysis of narrative that The Archdruid Report still hasn’t reached. If he wants to talk about narrative, that’s a very worthy pursuit, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s using narrative as an excuse to pigeon-hole and dismiss. If he wanted to actually analyze narratives, he’d have to start looking at those key details that change the direction of superficially similar myths—the kind of distinctions that put me on the other side of the world from the “Family of Love,” which are the same type of distinctions that seperate Greer from the Nazi Party. If you’re going to ignore those distinctions and dismiss me or you as apocalyptic cultists, then it’s only fair to ignore those distinctions in his own narrative, and ‘fess up to being a Nazi. Or are we really talking about a double standard, and not analyzing myths so much as using them to bully people who disagree with you? Which do you think is more likely?
Is it a farm if it’s for growing food? Many, maybe even most, gardens are for growing food. My mother’s garden is for growing food. Is she really a farmer, the way she joked?
I’m not sure I know what you mean by “sustainable farming.” You said previously that you wouldn’t consider Salatin’s Polyface Farm particularly sustainable (and I agree), but that’s generally considered the radical extreme of “sustainable farming.” On the other extreme is most of the stuff you buy at Whole Foods. In between is the bulk of what’s usually called “sustainable agriculture,” and almost none of it actually is.
Now, maybe your circles are well beyond even Joel Salatin, and in that case, congratulations, you may actually be sustainable. But historically (and contemporaneously; I’ve read of people doing permaculture in their yards and having their neighbors force them to cut it all down because it was an “eyesore”), truly sustainable cultivation has never been recognized by our culture as agriculture. As I mentioned, probably the best example of sustainable cultivation you could ask for comes from the horticultural tribes of the Amazon, who grew the Amazon as a vast food forest. Europeans tromped through this enormous, continent-sprawling artificial ecosystem, remarking on how the primitives had no agriculture. I’ve never seen anything that was (1) actually sustainable, and (2) would be recognized as a “farm.” I’ve heard many people try to force-fit the word to their projects, but they’ve always had to follow that up to explain why their “farm” looks like an untended wilderness, or at best a garden.
The definition of civilization has everything to do with cities. Of course, city life doesn’t require you, or even a majority of the population, to live in cities. Even in a rural town, your life is still orbiting a city, feeding it, recieving energy and other inputs from it, and so forth.
Well, I try to use words as I find them. The common usage usually reflects a lot of the etymological, technical and historical understandings, and I’ve found that often, an exploration of what we really mean by those words along those dimensions can solve a lot of questions right off the bat. But essentially every dimension of society that’s been deemed “primitive” has something to teach us about a sustainable way of life.
Plenty of primitive societies have used at least some amount of metal. I doubt metal will be abundant in the future, but undoubtedly there will be some amount indefinitely into the future, particularly with bog iron.
Primitive societies would somewhat redefine what you mean by “house.” You’d probably need to form a much tighter community with your neighbors, and that would probably lead eventually to much less “personal space” as you might call it. Primitive societies tend not to have such a notion, or at least, to place much less importance on it.
Reading comes with a costs you’ve probably never even realized. You should consider whether literacy is really something you want to preserve before teaching it to your children. My own kids will have to ask me to learn it before I’ll teach them, and certainly not before they’ve learned to track.
But primitive life really isn’t about what you give up. All those things have been done by some primitive society. It’s civilized society that’s asked you to give things up: your social context, your relationship with the living landscape, an isolation from the natural world that sustains you, and eventually bleeds into an isolation even from one another, it takes away from you such basic things as how to walk and how to speak and how to have fun, and gives you nothing in return. It takes away your humanity.
Primitive life isn’t about giving things up, it’s about taking back what’s yours.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 June 2007 @ 10:56 AM
To give some context on the Japanese comments from Paula and others, I have a few insights or simply facts, rather.
John Michael (his name is not “John”) is a great admirer of Japanese traditional (pre-modern) culture and spirituality. He is especially interested in the esoteric practices of Japan such as Shingon Buddhism and Shugendo. He was the first person that I’d met that recommended a number of books, such as the Catalpa Bow, on those topics. He flat out told me once that if he wasn’t a Western Magician (which he was then and still is with the glossing of being in a Druidic Western order), he would be a practitioner of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, he had an exposure to Japanese and Japanese culture (as did I, for that matter). His step-mother, who raised him with his father, is a Japanese American.
Anyway, some context for such things as why he would pick the Japanese for his story.
Comment by Al Billings — 27 June 2007 @ 12:42 AM
Jason,
I understand the distinction that you are making, and I agree with it. However, I think that the missing element here is commerce. A farm is for growing food for sale or trade. In modern parlance, those who go to a grocery store don’t care how the food was grown, it was grown on a farm. If your mother took her crop down to the “Farmer’s” market, she would be a “farmer” for all intents and purposes.
I even suspect (though I could be wrong) that your mother’s garden is layed out in rows with spacing as indicated on the back of the little paper packet in emulation of a farm.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 27 June 2007 @ 2:31 PM
Ah, yes, commerce would be an important distinction.
My suspicion would be that even a permaculture garden would become unsustainable once it becomes commercial, though.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 June 2007 @ 7:24 PM
thanks, jhereg, for the pointers on fostering garlic. as i live in an urban apartment (no yard) and work indoors, i’ve been mostly doing my own experiments in cultivation of various plants in clay pots–you need BIG deep pots for garlic, i know that much!
but the part i really don’t know, and would need some expert in-person teaching for, is the measuring and making of tinctures. this is why in the limited advice i’ve given to people in my life (and in my own efforts for myself) i stick with the herbs as food…i’m trusting that my stomach just won’t let me eat TOO too much of something out of balance–at least not more than once! first rule, after all, in any healing tradition, is to do no harm!
and, there are always important aspects to the food as we collect it that may be lost when we mess with it to make specific medicines–say the difference between willow bark tea, and aspirin.
but about this, Paula:
“The “cyclical narrative” of so-called earth-based religions is the story of planting and harvest, and is based on Earth only to the extent that crops are dependent upon rain, sun, dirt, and summer. The sabbats are time markers signifying which agricultural activities occur at various points during the year, and their celebrations, artifacts, and deities serve the almost exclusive purpose of ensuring a successful growing season.”
they may be that for you, but for myself, i disagree.
i don’t claim that this isn’t how those understandings of nature came to be used after the advent of agriculture, but i see no reason why it would not be useful to understand the cycle of the seasons for living in ANY environment, in any manner–whether one was hunting and gathering, doing some minor horticulture, or whatever! the point is to be AWARE of the wider world, and is not the sole property of any one style of food-getting: after the first full moon past the summer solstice, the salmon will run; or a people who moved with the seasons following herds would certainly pay attention to the suns and moons for keeping track! whatever.
Mr. Greer may be an official Druid, but as a person of very recent Picti-Scots and Irish background (or, really, a PERSON, period,) i see no reason why *I* can’t simply construct anew my own version of what *may* have been the spiritual beliefs of my ancestors, any less than those who admitedly are working with Romantic Era English literary guesses, projections and outright fantasies. given that is the reality here, my guess is as good as any.
i wish to fault no one elses’ sincere practice, and i truly doubt, that if pushed, JMG would claim his Druidic beliefs would *require* or are *based* soley on agricultural cycles, but i think i have as much right as anyone else to seek that connection and make my own meaning as it best fits the times in which i find myself. i don’t plant crops, but i pay attention to the cycles and the seasons.
and i still do not understand where the hostility comes from, regarding these issues.
Comment by patricia — 28 June 2007 @ 2:26 AM
Hey, Jason and I learned how to make tinctures at Racoon Creek State Park’s medicinal plants course! For some bizarre reason, I didn’t take notes on tincture-making, but here’s what I remember:
1. Dry and grind up the herb you’re going to use.
2. Combine it with vodka at a ratio of 1 part herb to 2 part vodka.
3. Shake up the mixture at least once every day for about a week or until the vodka is colored from whatever herb you used.
4. Measure your dosage with an eyedropper. The echinacea tincture we made, for example, called for 10 to 40 drops every hour if you have a really acute cold, flu, or fever. If the sickness really won’t go away, the dosage increases to 20 to 40 drops up to 4 times per day, though you should still take it for no more than 6 weeks without a break. My mom usually just puts a few drops in her tea when she’s sick, and even that small amount helps.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 28 June 2007 @ 8:53 AM
Paula’s absolutely right historically. The “earth-based,” or “neo-pagan” religions are absolutely agricultural in their origins. Now, hunter-gatherers are very seasonal, too, but the seasons mean different things to hunter-gatherers than agriculturalists. There’s no doubt at all where, say, Druidic concepts of seasonality come from.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 June 2007 @ 9:41 AM
patricia writes: “as a person of very recent Picti-Scots and Irish background…”
Me too. Interest in my paternal DNA is what first led me to begin investigating paganism in the mid-90s, and druidry in particular some time later.
Did you ever wonder why it is that the gods and goddesses of such diverse cultures as the ancient Norse, Egyptian, Mayan, Sumerian, etc., can be swapped like USB flash drives in neopagan ritual? It’s because every one of these pantheons grew out of an agricultural-based civilization. Pantheons of supernatural — that is, above nature, separated from nature — beings are required to ensure crop success, because the natural Earth is not conducive to monocrop fertility and lifecycles.
I haven’t read up on the archaeology of Scotland specifically, but in southwest Asia, the archaeological record doesn’t reveal vast proliferations of gods and goddesses until agriculture shows up on the scene. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but iirc, that is the general pattern worldwide. Gods and goddesses would appear to be an almost exclusively agricultural phenomenon.
“i wish to fault no one elses’ sincere practice, and i truly doubt, that if pushed, JMG would claim his Druidic beliefs would *require* or are *based* soley on agricultural cycles,”
I doubt he recognizes this is the case.
“…but i think i have as much right as anyone else to seek that connection and make my own meaning as it best fits the times in which i find myself. i don’t plant crops, but i pay attention to the cycles and the seasons.”
Personally, I think that is actually the value of neopaganism. We are so far removed from nature that it barely impacts our consciousness; but agrarian cultures of old still lived in extremely close proximity to nature, even if they were trying to beat it into submission, and were still forced on some level to be respectful of its realities. Anything that raises consciousness of the Earth and of peoples’ own ecosystems is a welcome step in the right direction, IMO.
The problem with paganism, as I am rapidly coming to see, is that it is the original mythology that justified unsustainable civilization at its advent; neopaganism is a latter-day affirmation of this belief system that fails to examine its own origins and consequences. It is the ultimate greenwashing campaign.
I did not realize this until right now, but the dispute between JMG and Jason is the dispute between Cain and Abel. JMG’s insistence on appropriating techniques from indigenous cultures to advance civilization, on silencing Jason unfairly at the outset of a potentially productive conversation, on using his fiction to kill off anyone who would have the unmitigated gall to resist civilization — this is, clearly and without question, the behavior of Cain toward Abel. How fascinating.
Comment by Paula — 28 June 2007 @ 5:48 PM
In animism, the rest of the world is your family, so the concept of “gods” is somewhat alien. There’s a few very cosmic powers, like the Sun, or the Creator, but on that score most animists look more like monotheists than polytheists.
It’s with farming that you see the spirits associated with farming not only become the only spirits worth paying attention to (the rest of the world is considered dead), but they’re elevated far beyond human relation to godhood, to reflect (and justify) human hierarchies of god-kings and their nobles.
Later, of course, as empires unite, so do gods, and you get monotheism, which emerges as part of a totalitarian regime—one god, one throne, one power, mine.
I agree. At least a neo-pagan is aware of the other-than-human world. But that’s still a long way off from living as part of it. It might be a step in the right direction for many people, but it’s nowhere close to a sustainable end-point.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 June 2007 @ 5:59 PM
thanks for the detailed information, Guili! Ran’s been making his own Oregan Grape Root tincture (similar properties to Goldenseal, so they say) using vodka, but he refuses to ever measure or time anything!
and i didn’t mean to come off so confrontational, Paula & Jason–sorry.
i *do* understand that what survives today of any pre-historical spiritual beliefs from the Celtic peoples does conform to what you say, and that yes, the official re-constructed Druidic, “pagan” etc. practices tend to fit that mold, as well.
but of course, what *exactly* survives, and *how* did it survive? we’ve mostly been left with only what managed to stick first through the argicultural invasion, and then also to survive in coded form under the veneer of Catholicism, and the written materials that we have are primarily also only those kept by the monks and priests…and, well, i don’t trust them!
we know for a fact that the Roman Catholic empire adjusted various holidays in order to impose them over older ones, and so why should that have not been the case when the farmers came to town, earlier?
i think it is truly impossible to know for certain what the spiritual beliefs and practices were, for, say the Picts. i think any *original* origins are likely forever lost now. which is why i feel free to make my own path–but i do not in any way claim to be any manner of authority on historial or pre-historical practices. as such, i don’t consider myself a “pagan” or “druid” or anything else, really. i can see plenty of NON-agriculturally based reasons for marking the solstices, equinox and cross-quarter points, and to me, the generic flavor of many of the currently observed or accepted practices, could easily fit a non-farming people–in climates with clear seasonal shifts, food is always going to be more plentiful (or more scarce) and life is apt to be easier, or a little scarier, over the four or eight seasons of the year, whether your food comes from the forest, or from the planted field (although the differences are more dramatic and riskier when you rely primarily on farming.)
and veneration of ancestors, for instance, or respect for the land, is not contingent upon argiculture.
i see no reason to assume that “gods” don’t adapt, just as much as people do…and so an animist spirit becomes a spirit of the hunt becomes a god of the harvest becomes THE God of Commerce and Control, and so on down the road.
the earliest material i’ve read regarding the “gods” of the northern British Isles seems to point to a lot of local, place-based & house-gods, as they say. in each village there was a spirit for a certain hill, or a well, or a really big old tree, and so on.
the ones that make the lists today fit the Roman pantheon so well because that’s what the Roman writers decided to do with them: “okay, you, you and you, are all now this one god, who we feel relates directly to Jupiter. done.”
kind of like coming through Ellis Island, that way: “your name is what?! nah. no way i can spell that. okay, i’m putting you down as Johnson. next!”
i can’t speak to any survey or comparison of beliefs world-wide, so on that count i’ll happily bow down to those with all the book learnin’!
(as for Clans, i’m afraid we haven’t really got one–my grandfathers grandfathers, as it were, got driven off whatever pastural or highland home they may have had, and shoved into the mining and factory shanty towns around Glasgow in the 1800’s, before getting shoved onto the boats bound westward in the early 1900’s! we’re TOTALLY peasants, no question there! the Irish side were mostly Cassidys, and i don’t know much about them. sliante!)
Comment by patricia — 28 June 2007 @ 9:30 PM
Or the gods are just projections of the beliefs of their adherents onto the universe. When the people are pastoralists, so are the gods. When they engage in agriculture and begin trading heavily, so do the gods.
After more than 15 years of Neopaganism and its like, I’ve personally given up on it as a spiritual path. It’s just more reinforcement of the existing order or a way, for the most part, for people to play act within a set of roles. Almost all religion is about this really. It is no surprise since we are social creatures.
I’m more interested in something grander or truer than just another way to play schoolyard politics.
Comment by Al Billings — 5 July 2007 @ 5:19 PM
Perhaps the evidence only appears in the archaeological record because agriculture freed up enough people to begin spending their time creating monuments to the gods they had had previously? A lack of evidence is not, in and of itself, evidence for a negative conclusion. The actual conclusion you can draw from this is that evidence of the worship of gods is an exclusively agricultural phenomenon.
The Australian aborigines had spiritual beings that would be classed as gods, but they were certainly not agriculturalists (well not all of them, some were). Sure they were drawn from the natural world around them, animals and ancestors, but they did not act in a way that would be considered “natural”, they were most certainly super-natural / god-like.
I would also hazard to say that pagan agriculturalists would mark the seasons for exactly the same reasons as hunter/gatherers, this being because they are times of change in the environment. That the agriculturalists undertook a different set of activities in association with those markings doesn’t invalidate the connection to the cycles of the Earth.
Comment by Geoff — 5 July 2007 @ 8:26 PM
From what I have read about this subject, this seems quite unlikely. Agriculturalists had significantly less time to fart around with things like idols and deities compared to their counterparts in the forest. If there had been a significant growth in the number of deities prior to the advent of agriculture, it would have shown up sometime between the time humans learned how to create abstract symbols (i.e., the advent of language, which is also related to the ability to symbolize abstract beings like deities and abstract concepts like “justice”) and the beginning of agriculture, anywhere from 100,000 - 12,000 years ago.
The only people that had more time than hunter-gatherers after the beginning of agriculture were the elites, who were dependent upon symbols, and created symbols, to justify their rule over the masses. Their hierarchy is always tied to the wishes of the gods and goddesses, if they do not declare themselves deities outright. Hierarchy is a distinctly pagan invention. If you remove agriculture, you also remove the agriculture-based deities, and without those there is no need for a Grand Archpoobah to rule over everyone.
This is why Greer’s insistence that all forms of deliberate planting are agriculture, and therefore symbolically his, is disturbing to me personally: He has essentially, symbolically, declared himself King of the Known Universe. Everyone who cultivates anything falls under Greer’s jurisdiction, and in his fiction he demonstrates his desire to kill everyone who won’t bend the knee. Welcome to empire, as far from nature as humans can get.
What I am saying is that pagan agriculturalists aren’t observing/celebrating the cycles of Earth per se — they are observing/celebrating the cycles of agriculture, and these are connected to Earth only incidentally; it is the first level of separation from the Earth and leads to where we are now. I go through annual cycles as well that are the result of the Earth’s cycles — in the fall I purchase a new scarf; in mid-winter I take St. John’s Wort for several weeks; in the spring I take down the storm windows and put up the screens. Is this the same as being connected to the cycles of Earth? I would say, not hardly. I could even make a party out of any of these — woohoo, beer and window screens! — but that still does not qualify as celebrating and honoring the cycles of Earth.
The bottom line for me is that at its roots, paganism began as the mythological justification for the endless-growth paradigm of civilization. It is responsible for the empire-collapse-rebuild cycle that has brought humanity to the edge of yet another collapse; the great ills that plague us today — globalization, hierarchy, racism, sexism, careless environmental devastation, etc., etc. — are outgrowths of paganism from the moment of its birth. (Pagans like to blame Christianity for all this, but it is worth remembering that Christianity is a pagan religion.)
For paganism to claim that it is an Earth-based religion is hardly different than American culture claiming it has eradicated racism now that blacks are free. Pagans — and John Michael Greer in particular, given his Grand Arch-ness — could contribute to a national powerdown discussion significantly if they would take responsibility for, and seek to address, the problems their spiritual ancestors unleashed on the world. It is a terrible shame that Greer has chosen instead to try to further these problems in the name of the Earth. In fact, I find it deeply offensive: the logical outcome of Greer’s worldview is a sustainable, green tyranny, enslavement that never ends because environmental homeostasis prevents hope of a future apocalypse. No fuckin’ thank you.
Comment by Paula — 8 July 2007 @ 1:40 PM
A little cynical, but essentially, yes. The spirits become the gods when wild humans become domesticated. Polytheism is a distinctly agrarian mode of thought. As agrarianism escalates towards its inevitable imperial mode, polytheism gives way to monotheism, monoculture, and ultimately, collapse.
Religion tells us who we are, what the world is, and how those relate: how the world relates to itself, how we relate to each other, and how we relate to the world. Those relationships are all there really is.
That would be true, except that it’s well established now that agriculture brought with it significantly less liesure time. There’s no lack of evidence. Look at the caves of Lasceaux, or any of the other Pleistocene cave paintings. The various Venii, such as the one from Willendorf. Lack of evidence is not a problem; this isn’t an argument from ignorance, but from direct observation of extant foragers, and how they relate to some of the same artifacts left that we’ve only recently rediscovered in Pleistocene dig sites.
To understand the Ancestors as “gods” is to fundamentally miss the point of the Dreaming. That’s certainly not hard; it’s a very nuanced and intricate theology, one that’s readily and easily misunderstood and underestimated by Westerners.
It’s a relationship to the earth, yes, in the same sense that making love and rape are both sexual relationships. Yes, agricultural cycles are about “connection to the Earth.” A connection is prerequisite for abuse and destruction, as those are specific kinds of connection. But that’s fundamentally different from the connection of a hunter-gatherer. Once again, it’s not change that’s the criteria, but the kind of change. Humans live in their environment, we always have an impact. The idea of “zero impact” is an unhealthy fantasy born of our delusions of seperation, isolation, and the pristine “wilderness.” But what winter means to a farmer is something very different than what winter means to a hunter-gatherer. Yes, they’re both connecting to the same earth, so there are some superficial similarities, but they are extremely superficial. Cycles of exploitation are worlds away from cycles of symbiosis.
Actually, even the elites had less time, though they came closer. It still takes several hours a day to hold court and perform all those lordly duties.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 2:10 PM
How do you interpret the current trend of fundamentalist atheism as fitting into this?
Comment by locke — 10 July 2007 @ 2:26 PM
It’s a different kind of monotheism. So Reason/Science/Technology replaces Jesus as the Savior, so what? The religion—the pattern of relationships about how we understand ourselves, the world, and how we relate—are changed only superficially. Evolving to be the greatest animal over a billion years vs. being created as the greatest animal in a day is not a significant difference; the Rapture is not so different from the Singularity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 2:33 PM
The spirits become the gods when wild humans become domesticated.
Traditions associated with spirits, rather than gods, have been carried along with agriculture since the beginning. It was the “gods” who were stamping out the spirits.
This can be attributed to the consequences of agriculture, but it wasn’t something that the people practicing the agriculture instigated. It was the people who were able to devote time to other things (such as churches and crusades) that caused the end of spirits. Some agricultural communities still today retain rituals related to spirits within their agricultural life. (Wassailing for example)
Perhaps polytheism and monotheism have more to do with the specialisation of human endeavour. This specialisation was facilitated by agriculture, it was made possible by it, but wasn’t necessarily required by it.
You keep coming up with this line of argument but you miss the entire point. It’s only “well established” if we agree to your narrow requirement on the use the extra time freed up by agriculture should be put to.
Agriculture freed up time for enough people that specialisation was able to take place. Without agriculture nobody had the time to undertake the devotion to various crafts to advance them to the levels we see today (or even saw in the past).
Just because, for whatever reason, they chose not to devote that spare time to what you class as “leisure” does not mean the time was not freed from the need to spend it on food production. It’s simple mathematics. If one person can produce food for 10 people, we have a situation where 9 people can now spend time doing other things. I’m sorry that they disappointed you and didn’t spend it on leisure, but, well, that’s just the way it was.
The problems arise when we arrive at a situation where that one person if forced to work, through some detrimental hierarchy, to support those 10 people. It would be quite possible to have a situation where 10 people do 1/10th of a days work in the field and all can have the remaining time off, therefore having substantially more time available than their HG ancestors.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, every other “evil” you see arising out of agriculture is more correctly attributed to failings of human nature, to the fact that we are not fundamentally egalitarian. People saw the opportunity to exploit others and they did so, and here we are today.
But this is all predisposed on your ill-founded belief that agriculturalists are inherently evil and out to vindictively destroy every living thing on Earth, with the exception of their particular crops.
Some of the later agriculturalists are perhaps ignorant of the damage they do, fair enough, and maybe some even truly feel this way in this day and age, but early agricultural communities would have had as much innate love and depth of relationship to the land as their hunter gatherer ancestors. For you to state otherwise is to project your modern understandings and prejudices of agriculture onto a group of people that had only one or two generations before actually left the hunter gathering lifestyle behind. They didn’t just wake up one morning and say “lets rape what we once loved” did they?
Why must it be that what the HG saw in nature is not what the primitive farmer saw? That’s an assumption on your part based on the knowledge in hindsight that farming can be damaging. It’s only “cycles of exploitation” from our perspective today. Primitive farmers would have been operating in the same worldview as their recent ancestors who were hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists.
Again, it’s not about whether they had less time for leisure. Where did they get this time to hold court? Did they exchange leisure time to do so? They certainly weren’t out foraging.
You’re mistaking the results of the exploitative elements of human nature for failings in agriculture/horticulture as a way of producing food.
If humans were perfect all along, and took up agriculture, then we would see none of the problems you gripe about as being caused by agriculture. Don’t get me wrong, agriculture would also look substantially different today as well, it’s not good the way it is today.
That some people exploited others when their time was freed up by the results of agriculture, that agriculture and the Earth were in turn exploited by these exploiters; these are not failings of a method of feeding people, they are failings of methods of dealing with people.
Perhaps by going back to primitivism where we have less “spare” time above and beyond food production we can solve all these issues, but that’s a bit like burying our heads in the sand. If we don’t have time to cause trouble then there won’t be trouble? A real pro-active stance that one.
Whilst I can see that we cannot change human nature, there must be better ways to deal with the problems it brings up than avoiding them through distraction.
Comment by Geoff — 13 July 2007 @ 1:56 AM
Precisely. In the early war of the Aesir against the Vanir, or the Olympians against the Titans, or any number of other variations, agrarian mythology remembers how its ideology displaced an earlier way of life and thinking and knowing. It’s our vague cultural memory that once upon a time, we jettisoned the sum total of our evolutionary heritage and decided to reinvent the wheel, society, and everything else.
Agriculturalists have less time to devote to other things. Simply repeating the commonly-believed myth won’t make it any more true. We assumed that agriculture gave us more liesure time for a long time. Then we actually studied foragers, and found out we have much, much less. Agricultural monoculture breeds a more theistic manner of thought. It makes the universe seem dead and clockwork, but there are still questions of First Causes, and a natural human inclination towards religiosity, so you wind up with gods that embody agrarian values. The dying and rising god is the wheat/corn/rice, and tricksters become devils.
Exclusive specialization very much requires agriculture. Every exclusive specialist is an elite who must be fed by a systemic intensification of food supply, which can only be supplied reliably by agriculture. Now, specialization-by-emphasis is another thing entirely, but that goes back as far as there have been human beings.
This is commonly believed, but patently untrue. Even among hunter-gatherers today, there are some extremely gifted specialists who have more time to put into their craft than any full-time civilized specialist. We can see some of the products of such specialization from the all-too-often ignored archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic. Just because you insist on ignoring the huge amounts of archaeological and ethnographic evidence of the richness of hunter-gatherer life doesn’t mean it will ever go away, and statements like these will continue to be ridiculous to anyone familiar with that evidence. Unfortunately, we suffer from that “Great Forgetting” that leads us to believe that the first two million years of human life are meaningless, and only the last 0.16% of our time on earth has any meaning.
Wow, you’ve never read anything about any of this, have you? OK, time to back up to really basic stuff. “Liesure” is the term used by archaeologists and anthropologists in discussions of labor specialization to encompass everything that isn’t directly tied into food production. So “liesure” includes things like the tool-maker spending more time making tools, or a potter spending more time making pots.
With agriculture, liesure time decreased dramatically. You went from something like 60% of the population engaged in food production for 2-4 hours a week, to 90% or more of the population engaged in food production for 40-80 hours a week. Specialization decreased. There was a precipitous drop not just in lifespan, but in arts, tools, ceramics, and so forth. There just wasn’t enough time; everyone was too busy farming. You do get monumental architecture, because that’s when you get elites, and they need to try to legitimize their power, so they work the population even harder to build Stonehenge or the pyramids. But the amount of specialization went down, becasue everybody had to spend a lot more time just to get their food.
Exactly—hunting and gathering is more efficient by an order of magnitude, so it only took a few hours of hunting by a handful of hunters, and a few hours’ gathering by a handful of gatherers, to supply enough food for everyone. On any given day, most of the population would be doing whatever they felt like doing: producing art, making tools, telling stories, whatever. Many were extremely gifted specialists.
Of course, with agriculture, that dried up considerably. As you said, simple mathematics. The intensely inefficient manner of agricultural production requires far more people to work far harder to make enough food. There’s almost no time for anything else. The arts are crippled; specialists become a rare elite rather than nearly universal; a very small number enjoys the profits from everyone else’s labor.
You got your ratios backwards: it’s 10 people working for that 1. 1 person working for 10 is more like a hunter-gatherer, and they all take turns being that 1.
No, it wouldn’t, but that’s because you’ve got your numbers bass-ackwards. See, if everyone’s doing 1/10 of the work and there’s no one to whip them into line, then they’re very quickly going to figure out that just letting food grow and then gathering it is a hell of a lot easier than growing it yourself. As long as they’re spending all their time farming, they’ll never have the amount of time hunter-gatherers had. Agriculture is not an easier or more efficient way of getting your food. It is harder and far less efficient. No matter how you slice it, the more cultivation you do, the harder you work for your food. Period.
And just like here, your statements elsewhere are based on the bald assertion of “facts” that are inescapably untrue.
It’s not ill-founded, it’s fundamental, as we’ve discussed previously. Simply re-asserting the “recieved wisdom” that’s already been disproven again and again won’t change that fact. The basic act of agriculture is the creation of ecological catastrophe. There’s no escaping that simple fact.
I don’t claim to know what they thought or felt or believed. All I know is what they did. Whether it was inadvertent or not, they developed a way of life based on the idea of wounding their landbase and sucking on the pus (cereal grasses fulfill the same role ecologically that pus fills in your body—closing up wounds). That agrarian mythology invariably turns immediately to celestial gods at war against the monsters from the earth simply reflects the agrarian experience. Agriculture puts agrarian communities at war with the earth, whether that’s what they consciously seek out or not. The process of succession is always trying to heal the wounds that farmers spend so much time and energy ripping open. “Vermin” and “weeds” are what we call plants and animals that try to heal those wounds. The result is that every farmer, regardless of what they think, feel, or believe on a conscious level, is pitted in a war against the entire living world to make his living. Is it any wonder, then, that agrarian mythologies place demons, devils and monsters in the earth, see the gods as capricious and cruel, or put in the deity’s mouth mission statements like, “fill the earth and subdue it”? These simply reflect the day-to-day reality of a way of life fundamentally based on ripping open wounds in the earth, so that you can live by sucking on the pus.
Maybe they did; I don’t know. I suspect not. I suspect that agriculture developed over time, and over time, agrarian mythologies changed to reflect their day-to-day experience. They could no longer relate to the stories their ancestors had told about how they lived in a paradise, and all the world around them was their family. That was too alien to them; they had to work hard under the burning sun every day, and every day the whole world seem set against them in every way. That’s why they started telling stories of paradise lost, and how the gods had cursed them to have to live this way, but the gods also wanted them to fill the earth and subdue it, so they had to keep at it. That’s when they started telling stories about how their ancestors’ relatives had been monsters defeated by their new gods, gods who demanded humans grow wheat to feed them, and why those their ancestors had once called family now seemed to constantly be trying to undo their labor.
Because when a hunter-gatherer sees a “wilderness,” he sees shelter, food, and everything he could ever need provided to him, free of charge. When a farmer sees a “wilderness,” he sees potential farmland gone to waste, instead harboring the vermin that prey on his crops and steal food from his family, from whence the weeds come that infest his fields. They see it so differently because they live so differently. As Derrick Jensen put it, you will defend to the death those systems that give you life. If your experience is that food comes from the grocery store and water comes from the tap, you will defend to the death the industrial systems that bring those to you. And if your experience is that your food comes from berry bushes and your water comes from a stream, you will defend to the death those bushes and those streams. And by the same token, if your experience is that your food comes from a wheat field and your water comes from a well, then you’ll defend to the death that field and that well. So the seasons can never mean the same thing to a farmer as they do to a hunter-gatherer, because they don’t live the same way, and because of that, they don’t relate to the world the same way. Their allegiances are different.
You’re getting hung up on conscious thought patterns. I don’t really care about conscious thought patterns. They don’t matter. Even if they were knowable, people aren’t rational creatures, they’re rationalizing creatures. Most of us don’t know the real reasons we do the things we do. That’s why anthropologists talk about etic and emic perspectives. In order to make their living and feed their families, farmers wound the earth and suck out the pus. That’s what farming is. If they did something different, they wouldn’t be farming any more, they’d be doing something else. Of course, they rarely think of it in those terms. Agrarian mythology gives you some of the best glimpses of how they reconcile that, because it speaks more deeply than any individual farmer probably ever thought it all through, being the collective work of whole agrarian communities. As a communal, and largely unconscious, expression, mythology tells you a lot more than anyone ever consciously thought. What people consciously think is irrelevant; conscious thought is not what motivates people to act, it’s the excuse they come up with after they’ve already decided to act.
“Liesure” is any time you’re not out getting food. All specialization falls under the heading of liesure time.
It’s no mistake. As we’ve discussed on this site many times before, the exploitative elements of human nature are merely the psychological ramifications of the specifically agricultural way of producing food. The only advantage agriculture provides is the ability to create elites, and elites only emerge with the Agricultural Revolution.
The notion that personality, thought, imagination, etc. are entirely internal to the human brain is a novel and completely civilized idea. Everyone else sees these things as the result of constant relationship. Intellect is something you breathe in with the air; imagination is communication between yourself and the place you’re in. (e.g., “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred” by Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen Dan Longboat). In that understanding, this becomes perfectly understandable. By changing our relationships, of course our personalities changed. The “will to power” is nothing more than what happens when people eat too much grass—we start acting like grasses.
There’s nothing really mystical about this, either. Is it mystical to suggest that a fundamental rejection of two million years of human experience and the adoption of a wholly new and dehumanizing way of life would have profound effects on the way humans behave? The so-called “exploitative elements of human nature” are no such thing in a wild context. Yet in domesticated Homo sapiens they run rampant. There’s no inherently “exploitative elements of human nature.” There’s just human nature in a maladaptive context. Square peg, round hole. Nothing more than that.
Who said humans were perfect? Hunter-gatherer life isn’t perfect, it just works, the same way that agriculture does not work. It’s not a question of perfection, but of what works. Every problem I’ve attributed to agriculture comes from some basic aspect of human nature that works out very well in a wild context, but is frustrated and becomes pathological in a domesticated context. Is that a flaw of human nature? Or is that trying to shove a square peg in a round hole? Does your frustration trying to shove a square peg into a round hole mean that squares are innately flawed, or does it just mean you should stop trying to shove it in the round hole? Evolution doesn’t deal in perfection, it deals in what works. As Daniel Quinn put it, “Nothing evolution brings forth is perfect, it’s just damnably hard to improve upon.”
That sentence is a fine example of the GIGO principle. Because you think anybody had time freed up by agriculture (because you’ve obviously never investigated the matter or read anything about it), you’re able to come to the conclusion that it’s just human nature to be exploitive, and in the past, we just didn’t have the time to do it.
No technology is ever neutral (though technology as a whole is more ambiguous). Agriculture creates patterns of exploitation by its very nature. It cannot do otherwise. It led to far less time for everybody, but it required elites to exploit the masses. This isn’t a matter of how flawed human nature is; this is what happens when you put humans in a dehumanizing context.
That’s not how hunting and gathering works. It gives you far, far more time to devote to specialization, to art, to craft, or to simply being. But it also changes our fundamental relationships with the world around us and with each other. That’s why it ceases to be exploitative. If it were simply a matter of having the time to exploit, then even putting Dick Cheney at the head of Microsoft would not be able to match a band of Bushmen for exploitation. But it’s not a matter of having the time. Hunter-gatherers have orders of magnitude more time. It’s a matter of how you make your living, and how that fundamental relationship creates the systems you’ll defend to the death, and the patterns of relationship that initiates. The reason hunter-gatherers don’t exploit one another is because they’re in a human context. Square peg, square hole.
There is: understanding that there is no problem with human nature. Human nature developed in a specific context, and it developed to be adaptive to that context. The “problems” of human nature are not innate flaws; they’re the symptoms of an adapted nature out of context, a fish out of water—pounding a square peg in a round hole. Rather than questioning how we can shave down the corners of the square peg (which is what we do every time we talk about the so-called “problems of human nature”), we should instead be asking why we’re trying to pound it into a round hole.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 July 2007 @ 10:59 AM
The question is who holds the myth.
My practical experience of agriculture (a non-mechanised form) indicates that we have a substantial amount of time available above and beyond food production.
Some of the figures below are from direct experience, some are extrapolated from that experience and include other elements based on “book learning”, those books being written based out of the practical experience of others. They are rough, but not too rough.
Vegetables, feed 5 people - 1 adult, 5 hours week including harvest.
Fruit, feed 5 people - 1 adult, 2 hours week including harvest.
Grain (here’s where I need to extrapolate a bit) feed 5 people (1 loaf a day per group) - 10 hours a week (based on average to marginal yields allowing 2 acres of production to provide enough grain for this.)
So this is a total of 17 hours a week, for one person to feed 5, and that’s not including any efficiencies such as using pigs to plough the fields for the grain. Spread those 17 hours across all the people involved? 3.4 hours per person, per week. Even if we doubled those figures (7 hrs/person/week) that still looks good compared to hunter gathering, given the other advantages of the agricultural lifestyle, such as being able to store yields so we don’t need to go out “gathering” too often in the winter, and the fact that we can grow what we like to eat rather than being forced to live off witchety grubs if they are all that happens to be available.
How can we make it look even more appealing?
Those hours aren’t spent every day, not even every week. Fruit work is done in two phases over the year, pruning and harvesting, the same for grains, meaning that most of the time you’re only spending the 2 hours a week doing maintenance on the vegetable garden.
I haven’t included time for cooking the food, nor for performing advanced processing like making wines and beers. I also haven’t included time for sundry activities like maintenance of bee hives and similar systems.
To account for all these extras (which might more readily be accounted as “leisure” as they are for pleasure rather than essential food production, but still, I’ll humour you) if we quadruple the amount, to 14 hours per person, per week, that’s still nowhere near the 40-80 hours per week you claim that agriculture would require of you.
So where do these amazing figures that you quote come from? They certainly seem to have little relation to the real world.
Now if one of the references you quote as gospel and base your theories on is so inaccurate, is there any chance some of the others are also? Perhaps you’re only reading a limited selection of references all specifically oriented to supporting your arguments?
Amazing stuff. It’s a shame I’m not a whizz at remembering things I’ve read to give references, but I’m certain there were (at least) a couple of aboriginal stories that dealt specifically with the consequences falling upon people as a result of being exploitative. Now if these “wild” people had to have such stories, they surely must have been predicting their future state as “domesticated”. There is of course no way they would have been showing such qualities at that time in history for them to be the subject of a story is there?
See, here’s the fundamental difference. I’ve experienced the things I speak about with certainty, and I hypothesise about other things, based on experiences I’ve had in the world, as well as hypothesising about some things based on what I have read in books.
Basing a whole worldview largely on reading books about other peoples hypotheses on evidence that is anywhere from hundreds to thousands to millions of years old? Surely you’ve heard of a signal to noise ratio, and you’d know the further back you go in time, the fainter the signal, the greater the noise. Yet none of the conclusions you draw have the faintest doubt attached to them, they are all presented as undeniable truth. Someone wrote a fantasy story about a culture, based on the DNA of seeds found in the belly of a single frozen specimen of a man and suddenly the truth of it is self-evident to all but the modern day ignorant savage.
I’m willing to question my conclusions and actually get out there and try things out and then do the math, as you can see from the information at the start of this post. Regurgitation of the received wisdom is just not for me.
I would like to offer some advice, just as I have been offered advice recently. In contrast to the phrase: “you’ve obviously never investigated the matter or read anything about it” which sort of sums up a lot of the phraseology you’ve been tossing about recently, which I imagine is imploring me to read more before thinking, I’m going to use: “because you’ve obviously never experienced it”, which would seem to carefully balance my lack of reading of your references with your lack of experiencing. I will not be so callow as to repeat it for each advisory.
Buy yourself a couple of dogs (avoid cats, they are uniquely alien on this earth), then some sheep and also some cows, spend some time with them and see how they act. Get out in nature and watch wild animals and see how they act. Experiment with the dogs especially, as they will probably be the closest to wolves, and given that populations of wolves in many areas of the world are no-where near what they once were, we can no longer truly draw conclusions about what their culture was like at time X in history when they had a population of Y and a food supply of Z via examination today. Dogs do have moments of egalitarianism, balanced out by other periods, as you shall discover. It’s the other periods that will interest you most, though I imagine you can spend some time discovering the true causes of what appears to be egalitarianism in their actions.
Then have yourself some kids, so you can follow them from the first day and see whether they match up to your preconceived notions about humans. (I would advise not proceeding with this step if you have trouble keeping the animals alive.)
You talked about families and social structures with children but it all sounds a lot like many of the books that are written by scientists who have never actually had children. I’m not sure where you’ll find “wild” people to continue your experiments, but I guess if you’re really keen you could create some of those too and see what happens. Just don’t let community services find out eh?
Finally, try a bit of “agriculture”, because, based upon the misapprehension above (disproven using numbers provided from practical experience), there is something seriously wrong with the books you’re reading. I think it important at this juncture that you reassess your entire worldview in light of this one “triviality”.
Oh, and please take all the above with a couple of grains of salt. I don’t take myself too seriously and neither should you.
Comment by Geoff — 15 July 2007 @ 3:21 AM
Geoff,
Hypothetically, agriculture can feed more people and allow others the chance not to have to work, in the same way that “labor-saving” technology hypothetically frees individuals to do less work. Unfortunately, in practice, greater efficiency almost always means greater expectation of output. So for example, let’s say I have to write out documents for work, and can handle a dozen in an eight hour day. Then, I begin using a computer that allows me to do that dozen documents in half a day, does that mean now I have four more hours of leisure. Well it might, but in practice my boss now just expects me to produce two dozen documents per day. Increased efficiency just emans increased output and comparable labor input.
Same with agriculture: what we see of peasant farmers isn’t that they produce food for their and their families needs only. Maybe they could do that in 3 1/2 or 7 or 14 hours a week. But how many peasant farmers are able to work those hours? They typically are compelled to work more, because they have to time to. That increased ‘efficiency’ means more food, but that just initiates the ‘food race,’ and more mouths are birthed to consume the food.
One can say the same of the pleasurable nature of forager ‘labor,’ as most of what they do are activities that many people in the first world do for fun (hunting, fishing, gardening, hiking, etc.)
Also, back to the issue: is it your experience that you work 3.5 or 7 or 14 hours a week, or do you in fact work more than that in order to subsist? My suspicion is, like most of us, you have hours of work than that. If an anthropologist from Mars looked at us, he’d see that, whether we ‘have to’ or not, we’re working 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 hours a week, and foragers actually are working 5 or 10 or 15. It’s all well and good to talk about what could be, but for whatever reasons, that’s not the case. I’d also venture to go one further, and say that, if it really were possible to agriculturalists to work those fewer hours and have the increased lesiure time, it would have happened. The fact that we haven’t seen that suggests to me that it’s not possible and not going to happen. Similarly, people like to talk about getting ‘the right people’ into political office, and how that’s going to fix things. Well, if that’s all it took, why has it consistently not happened that electing politicians creates a transformed, just, egalitarian society. They all seem to want that in their noblest aspirations. Could it be that there are structural and inherent reasons why this hasn’t happened? That as long as there is an isolated realm of human activity called ‘politics,’ we won’t see these aspirations reached, in the same way that as long as there is agriculture, we won’t see increased generalized leisure. The tendency to focus on hypothetical idelals, rather than lived experiences is I think symptomatic of our disengagement from the world.
Also, from above:
This reminds me of a quote I’ll paraphrase from Rev. Matthew Fox. He says that a central problem of Western spirituality is the separation of creator from creation. once we have theism, and god is ‘out there’ and no longer among us, in everything we experience and come in contact with, god may as well be nowhere at all. In that way, theism’s counterpoint isn’t atheism, since both of those deny the spiritual around us, but animism, which affirms god in all of creation.
Comment by Archangel — 15 July 2007 @ 10:10 AM
Geoff — your personal experience is not an adequate standard for measuring all of history.
Mistaking oneself for a god is the irredeemable flaw in pagan — that is, civilized — cognition. It is a meme that co-evolved along with agriculture, humans’ attempt to wield godlike power over the community of life.
If you want paganism to be pro-nature and sustainable, you need to deal with that original symbiosis. You need to undo the fall of man and figure out how to get the tree of life to grow from its punishment, agriculture. That is the bottom line; no matter how much you type, it does not change that equation.
Comment by Paula — 15 July 2007 @ 7:05 PM
I could say that this is hardly the fault of agriculture, but then I’m sure to hear that on the contrary, “yes, agriculture sent people crazy so they lusted for power, which drove them to make slaves of their fellow man which led to the conditions for this state of affairs” (so I didn’t just say anything of the sort, honest).
I will say just this, agriculture, freed of the need for some to make a profit off of others, could well leave us with the same time for leisure as HG.
On those components that we produce ourselves we’d be closer to the lower limits. We haven’t done work in the garden for about 6 weeks now (yes, lazy), yet there is still a fair bit of food out there (given that it’s winter here). Four hours of my (normal-work) working week is probably destined for food purchase, but then that is comparing apples to oranges in some ways, as most of that is luxury items out of season shipped across the world, and grain products. I did neglect probably 10 minutes a day in caring for animals and birds, which is over an hour per week, so it may come out closer to the 7, but that still seems reasonable to me. We’re certainly not slaving, and wouldn’t be if we fed ourselves entirely directly.
But of course we need to pay “rent” to the systems that “manage” the commons on our behalf. It’s institutionalised greed. It will of course be said that this whole system is the fault of agriculture. The fundamental question is can agriculture exist without greed, and can greed exist without agriculture?
Why would it have happened? Look at an executive that might be getting 2 or 3 hundred k a year, why do they continue to work the long hours their job might entail when they could do perhaps a quarter of the work and still live well? I could equally say if HG were so efficient and leisurely we would have been sensible enough in the first place not to go down the path of agriculture.
Yes, I agree with that totally. I just think that blaming agriculture for it is wrong. Agriculture was an inevitable step given the way the human mind works. But blaming agriculture is like blaming the atomic bomb instead of the people and mindsets that created and dropped that bomb.
I think that as long as there are power structures then we aren’t going to see leisure. Do you think local authorities couldn’t put together work-gang style gathering parties? Any method of food production can readily be adopted by an authoritarian ruler.
Well, that depends on how good it was, doesn’t it? You are correct of course, I was over-zealous with my generalisations, but it’s okayed on my poetic licence.
Personal experience can indicate fundamental flaws though, can it not? If everyone believed rain fell upward, and one person went outside and discovered the opposite through experience, what then?
I feel there is a flaw in the reasoning of “agriculture gave us less leisure time”. I think: “Agriculture created the conditions that allowed those aspects of human nature to come to the fore that would give the producers less leisure time.”
Whilst we could still reduce this to the previous equation, this would be in error, as it neglects that there were elements of human nature required to warp things to the current state. Without those elements agriculture would have been just as leisurely as any other form of food production.
Now I know that yet again I’m set up to hear about how agriculture creates the warped mind and not the other way around. It really is two religious views isn’t it? One says that humankind started out untainted and then fell with the attendant potential for redemption, the other that humankind is inherently tainted but can aim for an ideal of behaviour / has the potential for progress/improvement. These views are essentially irreconcilable because of what they are, so I shall try to stop being a pest about them.
Comment by Geoff — 15 July 2007 @ 9:57 PM
No actually, it isn’t. The view that humankind fell is firmly rooted in the findings of archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, economics, and other social sciences. It is recognition of having taken up a way of life that is unhealthy for every living thing in the world, and that such blunders are correctible. It is a deeply ethical use of science that resonates with the recorded observations of those who did not take up paganism and agriculture at its inception; and it is writ large in the language of mythology because we all share an unconscious cultural memory of our paleolithic past.
The view that humankind is inherently tainted is a value judgment. “Tainted” does not exist in the physical world; it is an abstraction. Abstraction is cognitive separation from the physical world — that is, from nature. As long as paganism refuses to see that its abstractions serve to separate people from nature, it can not claim to be an Earth-based religion; and as long as it clings to abstract notions like “purity,” it cannot claim to support sustainability: purity demands sterilization, while sustainability demands impurity.
Comment by Paula — 16 July 2007 @ 8:54 AM
Agriculturalists are not “humanity” in total, just a subset. Plenty of other human cultures have do not perceive themselves as “fallen”, nor aim for/require some sort of “ideal” behavior to live sustainably.
Albeit, at the moment, this subset has exploded in size, obliterating or subjugating 99% of the others, and thus “feels” like humanity in total…
But as we now see, this subset is quickly running it’s course, and won’t be able to maintain the high water mark of it’s short, 10,000 year run.
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 16 July 2007 @ 1:34 PM
Your experience seems to differ markedly from the controlled studies of these questions. I have to wonder why, if that’s the case, have farmers throughout history worked so hard to feed so few non-farmers? It seems there’s something else going on here. Is it soil quality? Something else? I don’t know, but your experience looks pretty exceptional against controlled studies and historical facts.
Yet even then, you’re still working harder than a hunter-gatherer. 17 hours a week vs. 15 estimated for the Dobe Bushmen, living in one of the most marginal and difficult environments. So even your estimate, which isn’t even a quarter of what’s been the historical reality for most farmers, is still longer than the most marginal hunter-gatherers. They, also, weren’t doing this every day. They’d go hunting perhaps once a week for about six hours. And moreover, as Richard Manning pointed out in Against the Grain, hunting is fun. Farming is not. (Although gardening is)
Controlled, longitudinal studies and historical realities. Most farmers throughout history have worked 40-80 hours a week, and taken up some 90% of the population. Most good intro to anthropology texts will go over this in greater detail.
I’m quoting lists of studies too long to name. This is basic anthropological knowledge here. It sounds to me like there’s something really exceptional about your situation; that, or you’ve underestimated something along the way. But my sources are too non-controversial to really be the problem here. This is basic anthro 101 stuff, borne out by literally hundreds of studies.
I’ve never suggested that civilization introduced any new aspects to human nature. That means that such things could happen even in egalitarian societies. But egalitarian societies had means to eliminate those elements. In our society, someone holding power is the norm. We are not an egalitarian society. In an egalitarian society, someone holding power is a problem that must be resolved, and they had ways of resolving it when it happened. It didn’t happen regularly, either. It wouldn’t make sense in that context. What was to gain from trying to boss people around? But of course, no aboriginal society was ever contacted that hadn’t had some contact with civilization first. How many of those stories were developed trying to deal with the ramifications of contact?
We’re not talking about the DNA of seeds found in the belly of a single frozen specimen for any of these claims. We’re talking about hundreds of skeletal remains, dozens of archaeological sites, thousands of modern ethnographic reports, and an enormous body of data.
You have your own experience, but what’s been exceptional in your experience? Basing on your own experience, you might easily extrapolate an overlooked effect of geography or soil to a universal condition (as I suspect occured above, with your time estimates that defy all of recorded history). If we’re discussing the general trends of human society, then book-learning is a lot more useful than direct experience. Direct experience is fraught with peril in such an endeavor; it will make the idiosyncracies of your experience far more relevant than they really are. I’d say most of the major misconceptions about human nature have been precisely because people put far too much value on their direct experience. When it comes to these questions, the real question is how much you can ignore your own experience, bracket it, and understand it as no more than just one more data point in the huge pile of evidence.
If we were talking about planting and farming, then that would be relevant. But here, your experience is detrimental to you. It skews the picture. It’s a hurdle you need to overcome, not an asset. I repeated that phrase so often because you keep repeating recieved wisdom without question. It may well be rooted in the direct agricultural experience, because it’s been repeated by farmers for a very long time. But it isn’t true. For questions like this, your experience is detrimental, because questions like this require you to ignore your experience, and the more of it you have, the harder it is to ignore.
There’s an excellent example of how experience can lead you very far astray. This is a horribly set up study. You can tell the results right from how it’s set up, because it’s set up to achieve only one goal: to reinforce your preconceptions. Dogs aren’t wolves. They’re domesticated, and they way they act shows that. All of the animals you’re talking about are domesticated. There are severe physiological changes that go along with that. Wathcing a bunch of dogs is precisely the kind of experience that will trick you into thinking you know what’s going on, but all it actually does is hold up a mirror to you. You get sucked into a narcissistic mirror-world where you can’t see out, all the while ever more convinced that you know what’s going on. I’m not saying experience isn’t valuable. I’m just saying it isn’t always valuable.
And every agrarian society in history. It seems to me that rather there’s something very peculiar about your experience. That’s the thing about experiences: they’re always particular. That’s what makes them uniquely suited to your life. That’s also what makes them a hurdle to overcome when the question comes to the “big picture” type questions.
Even then the numbers don’t line up with any of the recorded agrarian societies in history. Serfs work 8-14 hours a day, depending on the society in question, and make up 90% of the population. That’s how it’s been in every agrarian society in history. That’s how it comes out in observations of modern agrarian practice controlled for precisely this kind of estimate. Dozens of studies on this, all come up with these numbers, and they’re completely irreconcilable with Geoff’s experience. The entire history of agriculture is incompatible with Geoff’s experience. Geoff says it’s time for me to ignore the entire history of agriculture. I say there’s something peculiar about Geoff’s experience.
You mystify it too much. There’s always the people who are narcissistic, but in an egalitarian society the narcissist quickly discovers that the best way to get the attention he craves is to help others, be humble, get along, all that. With agriculture, a new possibility opens up: keeping everything for yourself and declaring yourself god-king. It’s not some mystical transformation; it doesn’t “drive us crazy,” as if by some magical power. It changes the context, and thus, changes what’s adaptive and what’s not. Agriculture makes it in your best interest to exploit your neighbors.
But agriculture is what creates the need to make a profit off of others. It takes more energy than it returns, so you need to rearrange the deficit. It can be endlessly rearranged, but that fundamental shortfall perpetuates itself across the system. It necessitates an elite, so the farmer has what the elites need, and the elites have nothing to offer the farmer. Violence, religion, or any number of other threats can turn the tables, so the elites have something the farmer needs much more immediately. This goes on endlessly, and ultimately creates the need to make a profit off of others. Agriculture freed from the need to make a profit off of others is like fire freed from combustion.
If you hunt and gather, there’s an element of risk in getting your food, and food is very ad hoc. You can’t very well hoard the food directly, not easily, so a greedy man hoards food in his friends. He looks after them when they’re sick, offers them help, makes sure they’re happy and healthy and strong, maintains his friendships meticulously, so when his hunt fails and one of his friends succeed, his friend will share with him. That’s greed, and it motivates him to share everything he has and care about everyone around him.
The same greedy man in agriculture is in a very different position. Now food can be hoarded directly, and the more he hoards, the more ability he has to hoard. He doesn’t need friends; compliance can be bought. Besides, the food surplus leads to systemic overpopulation, so he doesn’t know any of these people, anyway. Everyone’s a mark to be exploited, and why not? That’s how you can get ahead.
Everyone is always looking to get ahead. All that changes is what you do to get ahead.
There have been plenty of others who’ve tried to minimize the amount of work they need to do. Sure, type A personalities exist, but so do type B personalities.
The initial rise of agriculture is an interesting question, one that seems motivated in no small part by irrational fear. But the spread of agriculture is much more straightforward: from the earliest advances to current events, hunter-gatherers are systematically dispossessed of their lands, and squeezed out of their habitats like any other wild animal. They fight to the death rather than take up agriculture, and those that eventually submit often wish they had died. While many have “Gone to Croatan,” no hunter-gatherer group has ever submitted peacefully to agriculture.
It may have been inevitable in a particular time and place, but the mindset that created it was adaptive in most context. In a particular time and place, it led to agriculture. In that, it’s simply a case of ecological overshoot. The way reindeer act is generally adaptive, but drop them on St. Matthew’s Island and you still get overshoot.
No, they can’t. Only centralized food production can be readily adopted by an authoritarian ruler. Hunting and gathering is not centralized. An authoritarian ruler can control the grain supply and starve out those who won’t submit; he can’t control all the game or wild edibles, and that will make his decrees suggestions at best.
That’s not really analogous. If millions of people have always seen rain fall down, and then one person says he saw the rain go up … well, that would be worthy of investigaton. Not because anyone would think that rain goes up, but because something very strange was going on there.
So all we need for civilization to work is get rid of all those pesky humans? There’s the advantage of hunting and gathering right there: it works for people.
They’re not “religious” views at all. To say that humans are inherently tainted makes no sense. Are reindeer inherently “tainted”? Are algae? Why is it that when humans get caught into an ecological overshoot, it’s a question of how we’re not virtuous enough for civilization, and not that civilization doesn’t work for people? To speak of some kind of “taint” at all is ridiculous, I think. Humans are animals like any other, adapted to a particular niche. You can’t call some aspect of human nature “tainted” when it produces “good” in one context and “evil” in another. That just means that humans are adapted to a particular niche, like any other animal. It also means that when we’re taken out of that niche, bad things happen.
An important caveat, but I think Paula’s general point is still a good one.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 July 2007 @ 5:47 PM
I guess that’s why I find the argument against it so hard to deal with, and am so pig-headed about it. I don’t think the local conditions are anything exceptional, so perhaps it comes down to things like method, modern hand-tools, or things we don’t bother doing that our ancestors considered essential? Perhaps there’s even a whole class of activity I don’t factor into my equations that were essential in the calculations made by the investigators?
I do have to ask though: If a “lord” had lands (and as I understand it they were the ones that “owned” the land) and a population of serfs, then in their thinking it would make little sense to have land and serfs unproductive, regardless of whether the extra food produced was needed directly. As you know, I don’t know enough history to know whether this was a possibility, but it does appear feasible.
I’m afraid I can’t see how this could be a general rule. Due to the risks associated with outside forces, by virtue of the fact they were fixed in place and did store food, wouldn’t it make more sense to stick together as a community? Sadly, again based on personal experience, small communities in agricultural areas today have always seemed more closely knit than city “communities” (doubtful they deserve the title), but as I’ve learned this doesn’t necessarily translate across all history.
But at least one hunter-gatherer group must have actually adopted agriculture, mustn’t it? What sort of irrational fear could possibly drive people to it if it was so bad? I’m drawing a thread of half-baked ideas here, but if these people were surrounded by a world they felt an intimate part of and deeply comfortable within, what could come along that they would possibly fear to drive them to it?
Well, perhaps, but…
Obviously any “fix” for humanity is pigs with wings isn’t it? I have as much chance of getting rid of the sociopathic elements that control society as you do.
It is ridiculous when viewed from one point, but if my “myth” is that aspects of civilisation are good, but that we’ve messed it up through greed (or our failure to nip any other particular detrimental trait in the bud), then greed, for instance, can be seen as a taint or stain upon our culture, even though it was just a natural aspect of being when in our primitive state. My myth (and it may just be lonely old me holding to it) says that we are “improving” (a value judgement, yes) as a species, but that we need to find ways to deal with the negative aspects of our social selves as they exist within the current context. Yes, I know, you don’t believe it’s possible, but what’s the point of a person having a myth if they don’t believe in it?
Comment by Geoff — 16 July 2007 @ 8:52 PM
It’s certainly not anything our ancestors did–every peasant in history worked the 8-14 daily range.
Possibly, but there was a general difficulty getting enough food. Overproduction was rarely a problem.
That experience is much more typical. Yes, it’s cities where anonymity breeds that kind of exploitation. Small towns operate differently. But of course, you probably have some experience with those city-folks looking to exploit you because they have little knowledge, or care, of who you are? I understand that’s fairly common in small, rural towns; that’s what I’ve seen in the small, rural towns I’ve been in.
None of the ones we have any evidence of, and there’s a long list of them.
(1) The fear that the human species will be the only one that doesn’t have enough food to eat, the only one that the world won’t provide for. It didn’t matter how sick they got or how hard they had to work, because they were sure if they stopped, they would starve to death.
(2) Most of the worst elements of agriculture were probably not immediately apparent.
You probably need that connection shaken first. It really seems like the fear has to come first. An era of drastic climatic change, like the Fertile Crescent experienced at the beginning of the Holocene interglacial, could do it.
What happened in human evolution that made us so uniquely broken? Every other animal operates just fine. So what’s our problem? How are we unique? Of course, my answer is that there’s nothing good or bad, but social context makes it so; there are no sociopathic elements that control society. There are elements that become sociopathic in this context, but adapt well in another. But you reject that, and assert that there are intractably sociopathic elements to humanity. So, how does something like that evolve?
How is that not ridiculous? You’re saying that the greed used to be “good,” but then you put it in another context and there it’s “bad,” but it’s the greed that’s “bad,” not the context that makes it “bad.” It seems to me that it’s that first premise—that there are aspects of civilization that are good—that’s sending you spiralling into nonsense. So, is greed “good” or “bad”? If neither (as I contend), then that implies that a social context that makes greed “good” would be “good,” and one that makes it “bad” would be “bad.” But you’re saying that the context that makes greed “bad” is “good,” and that it’s humans who are “bad” for having greed, so we need to “improve” by ridding ourselves of our greed (which in our evolved social context would be “good”).
This seems like contradictory gobbledygook to me.
Yes, but shouldn’t a myth at least be internally consistent?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 July 2007 @ 9:13 PM
One factor I’ve found is that in medieval times grains had a production ratio of at most 1:7 whilst today you can get up to 1:200. So where we could work 2 acres and get our daily bread our ancestors would have needed to work about 30 times that amount of land for the same results.
And yet another reason to “stick together”
What I’m saying is that if everyone prior to agriculture was HG (which seems certain enough), then at least one HG must have changed to be able to have agriculture today. AFAIK agriculture arose independently in 3 different parts of the world, meaning 3 groups changed. Also, what of the speculation on the part of some researchers that agriculture may have been the result of the quest for greater status by way of the potlatch? Fear driven via status? Seems the innate checks and balances broke down there.
No need for shaking, that’s exactly what I was aiming at, what would create the fear to inspire the move to agriculture, and you’ve answered that with “climate change”.
I find it hard to believe that “social context” can exist without driving forces within the elements (people) that make up that society. What is a social context except for the emergent “sum total” of the creatures that make up that society? I’m not saying that all humans are inherently sociopathic, or greedy or whatever, but we have the potential to display such qualities, and our current society certainly makes them “desirable”, so success is a form of selection for these traits, to the ultimate detriment of society.
We as individual animals are not “broken”, the social system we currently inhabit is broken, as a result of the predominance of these qualities in their negative form (ie self-interest taken to levels that become detrimental to all around us) What I’m getting at is that it is entirely possible to overcome the influence these traits have on the shape of society, as it is, without the need to revert to primitivism. Indeed many elements of modern society are already making/have made this change.
Seemed simple enough to me before you got to it.
You contend that greed is neither good nor bad, only that within a certain context it is made one or the other. So by this reasoning the greed of the medieval manorial lords was good because the social context said it was so.
I, on the other hand, contend that greed by it’s nature is a negative influence in any society, it is self interest taken to an extreme. Greedy people will create a social context where greed is good, but this is actually bad.
Comment by Geoff — 17 July 2007 @ 8:45 PM
And why’s that?
Ah, I see now. Yes, that happened, and probably more than just three times. But it also happened gradually, over time. The effects of agriculture were not immediately apparent, because they were very gradually shifting into it. Their neighbors, though, could see the whole complex, and they fought it to the death. We’ve got strong archaeological and even genetic evidence that agriculture didn’t spread from the Middle East peacefully.
They did, because the ecology changed. The emergence of elites drove the agricultural revolution, and vice versa. Both were primarily ways of managing risk, and so, both were driven by irrational fear. See thesis #10.
Yup. For a community with a strong attachment to their landbase, sudden climate change is apocalyptic. Your various “Flood” stories, for instance, probably preserve some faint memory of the beginning of the Holocene interglacial, and the climate change that ensued: the very climate change that prompted the Agricultural Revolution.
Yet to date, we have many examples of how this change can be made, but they all come from primitive societies. In fact, we understand why this breakdown occurs—the mis-match of evolved human tendencies and expectations against the demands of mass society—and they are required by civilization. They are the very elements that define civilization. So to make a society where human nature is adaptive, you’ll need to eliminate the very things that make it a civilization.
No, you’ve missed my point. I’m saying that social context directs where greed goes. The greed of medieval manorial lords wasn’t good because the social context said so; it was bad because it motivated the manorial lord to exploit others. Today, greed motivated Ken Lay to exploit others. In a tribal context, however, that very same aspect of human nature—greed—motivated equally greedy and self-interested individuals to share all they had, care for their fellow tribe members, take care of the sick, stand up for their friends, and basically take care of one another. In that context, the context in which we evolved, greed was good. Greed made you do good to the people around you. Today, we have a different context, where greed motivates people to exploit one another. In our context, greed is bad. But what about greed itself? Is greed good or bad? I don’t think you can boil it down to something that simple, when in one context it leads you to help others, and in another it leads you to exploit them. That, to me, suggests that greed, like all of human nature, is not “good” or “bad,” but contextual. It works well in the context in which it evolved; it does not work well when removed from that context.
By the same token, do we consider “wolf nature” to be “good” or “bad”? Or do we recognize that in one context (the context it evolved in), it works, to the betterment of wolves and the whole world they inhabit, while in another context (say, running through Central Park), it doesn’t work at all?
So, a tribal person who shares everything he has and helps everyone around him is … bad?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 10:31 AM
So, is this a semantic difference or is the question really “intent vs behaviour”?
Comment by jhereg — 18 July 2007 @ 11:35 AM
My dictionary defines greed as ‘excessive desire, esp. for food or wealth.’ That makes greed a decidedly negative characteristic in my book. So what you’re talking about, Jason, is self-interest, not greed. Both primitive and civilized humans (all living beings, really) are programmed to act in their self-interest. One problem with civilization is that it so easily makes this human tendency manifest itself as greed. In a primitive society, greed is essentially never in a person’s best interest, which is why tribal people are far less likely to be greedy than their civilized counterparts are.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 2:15 PM
What I’m talking about is greed. Excessive desire for food and wealth. That’s what Ken Lay had, that’s what our tribal fellow had. It’s greed. You can talk about a great deal of greed or a little bit of greed, and you’ll find both in civilization and outside of it. Exact same feeling, exact same desire. In civilization, it leads you to exploit the people around you. In a tribe, it leads you to help the people around you. Because the social context is different. How you get food, and what constitutes wealth, changes. Greed is always in a tribal person’s best interests, but hoarding food is not a very good way to be greedy in a tribe. If you hoard food in a tribe, you’ll end up with less food than if you shared it. Someone who hoards food is not sufficiently greedy; he doesn’t have a sufficiently excessive desire for food or wealth, otherwise, he’d go to greater lengths to get more food and wealth, like sharing. In our society, sharing will not get you greater food or wealth. It will give you less. The loss must be overcome by appeals to conscience, because it’s never a rational, self-interested decision. There’s the difference of social context.
So, is greed a dedicedly negative characteristic?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 2:21 PM
“Excessive desire”. Excessive. When you say something’s excessive, you automatically imply it’s bad. If you didn’t think it was bad, you’d call it plentiful or something like that, but not excessive.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 3:57 PM
The initial rise of agriculture is an interesting question, one that seems motivated in no small part by irrational fear.
I’ve wondered if the rise of agriculture wasn’t perhaps a result of desire for sedentism. A scenario might be of a tribe in an area of such abundance that they didn’t need to move for many years. As they remained in one place they may have built more or bigger things that were then difficult to transport. This might lead to planting more favored foods closer to the village to enable the tribe to stay sedentary.
Just a thought with no evidence.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 18 July 2007 @ 4:07 PM
Yeah, excessive. What does excessive desire for wealth or food motivate you to do in a tribe? What does it look like? OK, you might say that in that case, it’s impossible for the desire to be excessive, but then you run into a problem, because our tribal fellow (let’s call him Bob) and Ken Lay are acting on the exact same feeling. Exact same feeling, exact same intensity, exact same level of consideration for themselves vs. others. In every regard, the motivation is exactly the same for Bob and Ken. Yet it leads Bob to help people, and Ken to crush them. Now, if you’re going to say that it’s greed when Ken feels it and not when Bob feels it, then I’d say you’re dealing with a tautological definition of greed: if it’s only greed when it’s bad, then yes, greed would always be bad. But Bob and Ken are feeling the exact same emotion, the exact same motivation, the exact same aspect of human nature. Yet in one context, it motivates Bob to help people, and in another, it motivates Ken to destroy people. So, semantic games aside, the original question—whether humans are simply too “fallen” in our evil natures to live up to the goodness of civilization, or whether civilization is a maladaptive system that makes a morally-neutral human nature stop working—is clearly answered.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 4:11 PM
There’s actually some pretty good evidence that it happened just that way, Jim. But what could motivate a desire for sedentism? Why not walk away from it? Sunk costs played their part, and stubbornness and unwillingness to adapt, all these things played a part, but when it comes to why these temporarily sedentary people didn’t simply end their sedentism like so many others is something that I think ultimately comes down to fear. The Agricultural Revolution was driven by the emergence of the first elites, and vice versa, and both were strategies for managing risk–for coping with irrational fear.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 4:15 PM
Well, I don’t know that Bob and Ken are feeling the exact same emotion… I mean, the emotion’s so much more complex. You have a desire for something (I think that, ultimately, it’s a desire for security). Now, for Bob, this security is readily available, given to him by his fellow tribesmen. For Ken, it’s something to be stolen from others. The feelings toward others are a part of the emotion.
But anyway. When you say ‘excessive’, it means it’s more than it should be, so you’ve already got a value judgement. If I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a particular person’s desire for food/wealth, then I’m not going to call this desire excessive (i.e. greater than it should be), and I’m not going to call the person greedy. Now, it is certainly possible for you and me to observe the same person and to disagree about whether or not the person’s desire for wealth is greater than it should be. But if we both call the person greedy, then we agree: the person shouldn’t be desiring wealth to such an extent. If you call someone greedy, you are already passing judgement.
It’s the same situation really as with words like ‘rape’ and ‘murder’. Rape (unlawful and forceful sexual contact) is bad by definition; if I don’t think it’s bad, I won’t call it rape, I’ll simply call it sex. Murder is an unlawful killing, and therefore by definition bad; if I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a particular killing, I’m just going to call it a killing, and not a murder. These words already contain a value judgement.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 4:32 PM
Bob’s fictional. The whole purpose of Bob is to feel the same emotion as Ken in a different context.
So, tribal peoples are incapable of greed? Isn’t that a little starry-eyed? The feelings toward others is not part of the emotion. Emotions aren’t that complex. They scream FUCK and KILL and EAT. They don’t have nuance like that; that’s what happens when the emotion gets run through our brains to become plan and action. In this case, it’s GRAB! How to best grab is the only difference between Bob and Ken, because they live in different contexts.
Sure, and that’s the very premise that is Bob: he’s greedy. He’s a greedy tribal person. He shouldn’t be so desirous of wealth and food. It’s unseemly. We both agree that his interest is taken to an inappropriate degree. Whatever it takes to make Bob that guy, that’s who Bob is.
So, what does Bob do, in a tribal situation, to get the things he desires to such an inappropriate degree?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 4:40 PM
Oh, I’m sure that tribal people can be greedy. It’s just that they are far less likely to be that way than are the civilized folk. (Why? Because in civilization, a great deal of wealth will buy you status and security. In a tribal context, if you act on your excessive desire for wealth, that is, if you start hoarding, then you get shunned.) And furthermore, I’m perfectly ready to believe that tribes have better ways of channeling/diffusing/amortizing greed when it does appear in one of its members than civilization does. Doesn’t change the fact that Bob’s desire is entirely inappropriate and even harmful. It’s just not as harmful as when a civilized person becomes afflicted with it.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 5:20 PM
No, no, no, that’s exactly my point, see, hoarding in a tribal society typically doesn’t happen unless there’s something else going on, something that’s upset the usual order. Because why would you hoard? Excessive desire for food or wealth, right? Except that’s not going to get you a lot of food or wealth. You don’t have much means of preserving food, for instance. So what will you do? You’ll be generous and kind to the people around you. A Big Man who throws a huge potlatch is acting just as greedily as Ken Lay ever did, but how you act on your greed changes because of the context. It’s just a different ways of grabbing everything you can for yourself.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 5:24 PM
[quote]A Big Man who throws a huge potlatch is acting just as greedily as Ken Lay ever did[/quote]
I fail to see how. I mean, there’s certainly no excessive desire for (material) wealth involved: after the potlatch, the Big Man winds up with less, not more wealth. Perhaps you could say that this isn’t about material wealth, but rather about social recognition. But is this really a matter of an excessive desire for social recognition? Because if the acting out of this desire is beneficial to everybody, then how is the desire excessive? It might be a very strong desire, but it isn’t excessive (i.e. greater than it should be). And if the desire isn’t excessive, then we aren’t talking about greed anymore.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 7:01 PM
Oh ho, come now, you didn’t really miss that, did you? If you can’t store food, then in order to have more material wealth, you need to get everybody to hold it for you. The indebtedness that a Big Man creates at a potlatch means that everyone owes him. It translates directly into material wealth. That’s why Big Men are so wealthy, and why they become chieftains, and then god-kings. The effort they put into potlatches and mokas and other competitive feasts is absolutely enormous, excessive by any measure, even excessive by definition. It’s what Veblen pointed to as “conspicuous consumption,” and the whole point is for it to be excessive. No, the Big Man ends up with much more materially, that’s why they do it. But there’s no seperation of social and material wealth in tribal societies. They’re immensely wealthy, and they always want more, but the way you get more is to help people. That’s the point. It’s all about context.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 8:12 PM
Look, my basic point is this. If everyone profits from the acting out of your desire, then it wouldn’t be preferable for your desire to be less intense than it is, and if it wouldn’t be preferable for your desire to be less intense than it is, then it’s not excessive. If your desire is not excessive, then we aren’t talking about greed.
Now, if your Big Man’s potlatch leads to his becoming a god-king (that is, to the establishment of a hierarchy), then something negative indeed is going on here. In this case, the desire is excessive; the reason for its getting labeled as excessive is precisely the fact that it leads to negative consequences. So now we can talk about greed, but only because we have these negative consequences.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 8:47 PM
Well now you’re simply in a tautology. We’re talking about the supposed “failings” of human nature, like, “Humans are greedy.” How can the emotion you feel be determined by its effect? No jilted lover ever actually loved? If you’re going to say it isn’t greed if something bad doesn’t follow from it, then it’s just a circular argument. In those terms, then it’s simply impossible to be greedy inside of a tribe, but of course we all recognize that as hogwash. Tribal people feel greedy all the time. The difference is how that emotion manifests. I’m not talking about whether you’re “good” enough to suppress it, but how you go about acting on it. So you’re telling me that the exact same emotion that’s greed inside of civilization, is not greed in a tribe? Well then, I suppose all I can say to that is that we’ve given up on the original question of human nature in favor of word games. But that also means that the “flaws” of “human nature” only exist inside of civilization (which, for instance, is the only context where “greed” is apparently possible). Which begs the question, are they actually “flaws” of “human nature” at all, if they can only exist inside a very specific social context?
That all seems like B.S. to me. It seems quite clear that Bob and Ken can feel the same thing, but different social contexts drive them to different ends. To call one “greed,” and the other not simply because of how that same emotion ends up seems like a bunch of semantic word play to me. Greed is an emotion, nothing like rape or murder, which are actions. Emotion motivates us to act, but you can’t call the same emotion two different things just because of what that action ends up causing. That’s just dishonest.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 8:56 PM
See, to me, it doesn’t make any sense to separate an emotion from its manifestation. If exploiting others is the only way I know of increasing my (material) well-being, then I’ll never be able to even think of increasing my well-being without also, on some level, thinking of how I might best exploit others. In other words, my desire for an increase in my well-being will become inextricably linked to a desire to see others impoverished/exploited. If, on the other hand, my only way of increasing my well-being is to increase the well-beings of others as well, then my desire for an increase in my well-being will become inextricably linked to a desire to increase the well-being of others. It might very well be that I desire to increase my well-being in both cases, but the very emotion that I feel is different, it feels very different. In the first case, we’re talking about greed. In the second, we are not. Just as the sexual attraction that a man deeply in love feels in the presence of his girlfriend is very different from the sexual attraction that a man feels in the presence of a woman he’s about to rape. And yet both experience sexual attraction!
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 9:36 PM
It’s a cause and effect. If I kick a ball, it might roll off and stop, or fall down a cliff, depending on the context (like, if it’s on a grassy field, or next to a cliff when I kick it). The kick is the same.
I’ll bet you do observe the difference, though: if someone’s mildly upset, and they bump you, and they happen to do so at a moment when you’re off-balance so that you fall down, does that mean that they’re not just irritated but irate?
That’s not true at all. Our CEO’s aren’t out to hurt you. They just want more money. If they can get that by helping you, they’ll help you, and if they can get it by squashing you like a bug, they’ll do that, too. They think up ways to get more money by helping people all the time.
But it’s not. Ken Lay just wanted more money. Do you really think he cared if he hurt others? That would require thinking of others first, and that’s where the disconnect lies. Greed isn’t inextricably tied to one consideration of others or another; it’s almost by definition unconcerned with what happens to others. Malice and benificence would both require consideration, which is precisely what greed lacks.
But they’re not different. I know, the cliche is that rape’s about power, not sex, but they’ve done studies on this. Rape isn’t about power, it’s about sex. And making love to your girlfriend, also sex. Exact same emotion. Differing views and/or capacities for self-restraint, and definitely different levels of sadism, but the underlying emotion is exactly the same.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2007 @ 10:03 PM
It would be due to selection of species. The grains used at the early end of agriculture were primitive, whilst we’ve now got a few thousand years of selection under our belts.
And the same IIRC in Britain, where they have evidence (in one particular area) of two distinct land use patterns without any of the overlap that would indicate cross-fertilisation. They remained each to their own. But still, even today with our current pace of change humans still contain an element of “fear of change”, whether the change is ultimately for “good” or “bad”.
And the ecology will change again in the future. If the checks and balances broke down once before, then it’s almost a sure bet they’ll break down again. Do we set ourselves up to repeat the whole cycle again (on a smaller scale due to resource depletion) or do we find a new way forward?
Also, Thesis 10 seems to contradict your statement above:
Overproduction is required in order to maintain a surplus, and from thesis 10 a surplus is required in order to do just about anything.
And here is where modern society out of agriculture has an advantage. We are able to take a view of the entire world, monitor climate change over time and develop strategies to adapt to it. We are no longer “stuck” in the bioregion as in the past. If our region changes to resemble our neighbour’s we can examine the information and make decisions to plant new crops from that region. We can make a whole new range of logical responses to the impacts, where our forebears could only make a limited range: move (with attendant risks), take up agriculture, or go hungry/starve.
I know you’ve said before that HG don’t have problems with starving, but at the same time you point to climate change and food supply fears as being one of the motivators for the shift to agriculture. This says to me that there must have been insecurity of food supply, which agriculture, at the time, was able to alleviate. Now certainly agriculture then leads to famines, as a function of overpopulation, but that is an eliminate-able factor, it is a factor we can do something about through education.
I heartily agree that we can learn a lot from primitive societies in this regard. As I understand it, your working definition of “civilisation” is essentially “the state” as a form of social organisation, rather than civilisation in the common parlance of being “refined” and not “barbaric” (whatever that may mean). Primitive peoples were obviously civilised under the common man’s definition, in that they did have art and craft and weren’t “uneducated beasts” as our recent ancestors would have us believe.
If civilisation is defined as the modern “state” (social rather than “state of being”) then certainly it is predicated on greed and cannot exist without it. Rampant competition, detrimental consumerism, corporate sociopathy, if these sorts of things go to define “civilisation”, then so be it, get rid of it. But if civilisation is something more than this (and I’m sure philosophers have considered that question at great length) then perhaps there are things in it worth taking into the future.
I heartily agree with that. You can have benign or positive self-interest or detrimental self-interest, which we’d call greed. Bob feels the same as Ken, and both are doing their community a disservice. “Alice” on the other hand, she feels her self-interest is best served in positive actions helping others and we have another name for this that is not “greed”.
Isn’t greed just a modification of fear? Aren’t positive actions for self-interest dependent on trust? And trust requires lack of fear?
The Big Man with his potlatch, when carried beyond certain levels, is doing his group a disservice, his self-interest becomes negative when everyone gets accustomed to more and starts to expect it, and everyone has been subsumed to his way of thinking and social networks are twisted beyond simple reciprocal relationships. It might seem acceptable within the bounds of his own group, but if they then have to impinge on the territory of neighbours in hunting and gathering then it has outward negative effects upon the community.
Whilst I don’t know a lot about them, the superficial things I’ve learned about the Amish would seem to indicate that they are a fairly good example of an agrarian culture where greed is not the norm, and positive expressions of self-interest hold sway. Their lives seem “civilised” enough to qualify as a form of “civilisation” yet without the aspects of mainstream civilisation that are so detrimental to both humanity and the world.
Comment by Geoff — 18 July 2007 @ 10:31 PM
[quote]Greed isn’t inextricably tied to one consideration of others or another; it’s almost by definition unconcerned with what happens to others.[/quote]
I am willing to accept that CEO’s are trained not to think about anyone else, just to think about making money. Generally speaking, civilized people tend to be alienated from others, and therefore unconcerned about others, far more than tribal people could ever be. Now, what I am not willing to buy that a tribal person, trying to increase his well being and doing so through increasing the well-being of others, is unconcerned with the well-being of others, and therefore greedy. Does it ever happen? I’m sure it does. It’s still a bad thing (you’re using others as nothing more than a means to an end; the fact that they also happen to benefit materially from the transaction doesn’t change the fact that you treated them as things), although the consequences may not be as severe as in the civilized context.
[quote]Rape isn’t about power, it’s about sex. And making love to your girlfriend, also sex. Exact same emotion. Differing views and/or capacities for self-restraint, and definitely different levels of sadism, but the underlying emotion is exactly the same.[/quote]
I’m not even going to bother responding to that. I hope you’re just saying it because you really want to win a debate rather than because you actually mean it.
Comment by Hasha — 18 July 2007 @ 10:35 PM
HelLOoo
Civilization is about to go down the shitter, and probably most of the world’s human population along with it, not to mention the mass extinction we are in the middle of, exactly because our primary adaptation strategy — agriculture and all its requirements — causes the very climate change we’re trying to adapt to.
Geoff, maybe you can explain something… I truly do not understand your resistance to seeing the obvious fact that agriculture is the deepest root of nearly all, if not actually all, humanity’s most intractible problems. If you entertain the thought for even a day all the pieces fall together effortlessly, like magic. Why is this notion so repulsive to you, especially when no one is suggestion that you, or anyone, must live like a hunter-gatherer? Truly, I would like to understand, because when I first started learning about this stuff it was the first thing I ever found, in my life, that actually made sense across the board.
Comment by Paula — 19 July 2007 @ 1:47 AM
Part of the reason is that it just doesn’t make “across the board” sense to me. Blaming “agriculture” as the root of all of society’s problems seems like a cop-out to me, it makes all problems insurmountable, nothing is worth fixing unless we can do away with agriculture, the “root problem”.
Comment by Geoff — 19 July 2007 @ 6:40 AM
That doesn’t make much sense; most farmers a hundred years ago were working the same hours as medieval peasants. So it can’t be a few thousand years of selection; at best, it’s a few decades.
Absolutely. But it takes a very specific type of change. Nearly all types of change hunter-gatherers handle extremely well. So, with global warming ending not just the Holocene interglacial but the whole Pleistocene ice age, we’ll need to wait for a new ice age to settle in some millions of years in the future, then wait for a new interglacial of the same pattern as the Holocene or the Eemian, and when that happens, if you’ve got people living in the right kind of flood plains with the right mix of domesticable plants and animals, you’ll have a good chance of agriculture arising again. Except you still won’t have metals or fossil fuels replenished, so it will die out pretty quickly before it spreads very far. But wait a few more million years until there’s some more metals and fossil fuels, and then wait for the same constellation of climatological and ecological factors, and you’ll have a new civilization.
Notice that we’re now talking about hundreds of millions of years, in terms where significant continental drift also becomes a factor.
Agriculture wasn’t a reasonable reaction to any kind of common ecological change; it was a fluke born from an extremely specific constellation of factors that only come together once every few hundred million years or so. Any system can go haywire under exceptional circumstances, and human nature is no different. Same with any other animal. It’s just like throwing unexpected input at a computer program.
That’s why agriculture accounts for such a vanishingly tiny sliver of the human experience. The past 10,000 years are just the most recent 0.16% of the two million years that the genus Homo has been on earth, and even during that time, agriculturalists were outnumbered by everyone else until very recently, like the past century or two.
This is great for a little perspective.
Civilization is a fluke, a flash in the pan, an evolutionary dead end that started suddenly and is crashing even more suddenly. It’s most spectacular for its breath-taking brevity: the dodo bird lasted longer. Might such a fluke happen again? Under the right circumstances, yes. (Of course, by the time such circumstances happen again, we won’t even be Homo sapiens anymore, so I can’t predict anything.) That doesn’t mean this momentary flash in the pan is going to last.
The surplus had to be enforced by the elites. The people didn’t have enough food, but the rulers usually used force to make sure there was food in the granaries, even while there wasn’t any in people’s stomachs. So yes, you actually managed to have a surplus and people without enough to eat at the same time.
Bullshit. When the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, what happened to the civilized centers? And yet, what happened to the hunter-gatherers? Only civilized societies are susceptible to natural disaster and climate change. Hunter-gatherers adapt far better.
The transition to agriculture was brought on by irrational fear. Complexity promises to manage disaster better, but it fails to actually do so. It’s an unfulfilled promise. These were hunter-gatherers worried about being susceptible to hunger, so they accepted a system of systemic famine; they were afraid of running from natural disasters, so they became vulnerable to natural disasters. They probably didn’t know it would end up like that, but you can’t say that civilization has an advantage in regards to its adaptability to climate change: it has a very distinct disadvantage. When it comes to actually adapting to changing circumstances, nothing is as brittle as civilization.
That attitude will likely be responsible for more deaths in the coming century than anything else.
No, most hunter-gatherers go through periodic times of hunger. They don’t starve, but they don’t get as much as they’d like, and what they get isn’t their favorite foods. These happen from time to time, and they’re unpleasant. They wanted to avoid this unpleasantness. Gathering and storing grain was a common means of getting through these lean times; grain was an inferior food stuff all around, but if you had nothing else, it would keep you from dying. As things got worse, there was more emphasis put on grains, and more time spent cultivating them, which required sunk resources not just into fields, but into mills, and eventually granaries, and that meant towns, which eventually meant agriculture, and elites. Agriculture was always a sub-standard option, and it always brought with it a guarantee of outright famine, as opposed to a hunter-gatherer’s periods of simple hunger, but you’re looking at the situations where human nature goes haywire. Sunk costs make us act irrationally even today, and irrational fears pushed people to choose starvation over hunger. It was a thoroughly irrational process, motivated by a constellation of factors that made human nature go haywire.
No it’s not. If you educate people, then all you’ve educated them to is that they can make more money by having more kids. Education is correlated to lower birth rate, but it isn’t causal. Both are driven by complexity. As complexity increases, the cost of raising a child increases, so you can’t send the kid into the fields to make money, you have to spend money sending him to school. In an agrarian society, you have overpopulation because the food supply permits it; individuals have kids because that’s how you get rich. Kids are free labor. If society is too complex, though, then kids become an economic burden rather than an asset, and you need to overcome that with purely sentimental reasons.
So education won’t do diddly-squat. Human population is a function of food supply. If the food supply is there, there will be more population. If you act responsibly, that just leaves more room for your neighbor to have even more. You can’t control that, that’s not eliminate-able.
But population is only one reason that agriculture leads to famines. There are two much more basic reasons than that:
(1) Agriculture relies entirely on an extremely narrow selection of extremely closely-related, domesticated species. It’s an “all your eggs in one basket” problem. One bad summer can kill off most of your food supply; by contrast, a forager is a nomadic omnivore, so basically every living thing is a viable source of food. It takes a dry summer to send a farmer into a famine; it takes the apocalypse to make a hunter-gatherer somewhat peckish.
(2) Agriculture destroys its landbase. Monoculture kills the soil in precisely the same way that you might run your car in a closed garage. All the same species putting all the same things into the soil, and nothing to take them out again. Repeating a natural disaster every year (a.k.a., plowing) takes its toll. Eventually, the soil fails. The vast cedar forests of the Fertile Crescent become the blasted wastelands of Iraq; the fertile Great Plains become the Dust Bowl. That’s what agriculture does, and when it does, famine follows. So wondering why famine follows agriculture is like wondering why logs turn black and charred just because you put them into the fire. That’s what it does.
Right, the actual definition of civilization. Art, philosophy, technology, etc. are all far, far older than civilization, and common to all human cultures, civilized or not, so what sense does it make to define civilization in those terms?
The state is one part of it, but there are other parts—though the state cannot exist without them. The word comes from the Latin civis, meaning city-life, and all civilizations have cities. That’s probably the best definition: a culture of cities. In thesis #13, I went through all the various definitions of civilization, including Childe’s criteria. Full-time labor specialization, agriculture, cities, class structure, elites and State-level organization form a cohesive set. You can’t have one without the others. They’re inseperable.
There may be many valuable things we can take from civilization, but they’re the incidental things that civilization has developed along the way. The defining aspects of it form an inseperable complex that can only be rejected.
The Amish are definitely civilized, and their way of life is not sustainable. It would be a shorter jump for them than for most of us, though, so I expect that they’ll make it. They already started shifting more towards something like permaculture as a reflection of their religious views, for instance.
OK, so we’re agreed that Ken and Bob are both greedy, which is apparently “bad.” So what’s the impact on society? Ken does harm, and Bob does good. So, the original question about the innate “flaws” of “human nature”—do they exist? As we’ve seen, this “flaw” is good in one context and bad in another. It is adaptive to the context it evolved in, and maladaptive to an alien context. What does that say about the “flaws” of “human nature”?
I understand it’s an emotional issue, but they’ve studied this question, and it isn’t power that motivates a rapist, it’s lust. I know the party line is that it’s about power rather than sex, but it turns out that’s a myth, and what good does it do to repeat the party line when it’s known to be false?
Does that justify it? Hell no. And if you’re reading that as a justification for rape, then have you ever missed the point. In fact, my point wouldn’t work at all if rape were justifiable. The very point is that the same motivation can lead to malevolent or benign ends, so yes, rape is an awful, awful thing. I’m kind of surprised I actually have to say that.
But as to what motivates a rapist, what’s so awful about the thought that he’s motivated by lust, and not aggression? Is that somehow “ennobling”? We’re still talking about someone who has a pathological approach that takes violence as a justifiable way of getting what you want, in either case. But if rape was about power, then it wouldn’t take the form of rape. We watch animals rape each other and we recognize that it’s about sex, so why can’t we acknolwedge that in our own species?
A rapist is acting because he wants sex, and because of who and where he is, violence seems like a perfectly acceptable way to get it, to him. What it will do to the woman isn’t something he cares about. In another context, that same desire for sex will lead to a lovely evening beyond two mutually consenting adults. Both equally want sex (though their understanding of acceptable and unacceptable violence, to say nothing of self-control, obviously differ profoundly), but what follows from that desire could hardly be more different.
But you’ve suggested that instead, the “root problem” is human nature. That’s something that’s absolutely insurmountable. But agriculture is fairly easy to leave behind. It’s an infinitesimal sliver of the most recent history of our species, a flash in the pan, a fluke. In the sprawling history of humanity, if you blink, you’ll miss it entirely. There are few things the earth has ever produced more passing, more trivial, more temporary than this. Even the most unabashedly absurd and maladapted mistakes evolution has ever birthed lasted longer than this, and none of them failed nearly so spectacularly. In scale and in speed, agriculture is easily the biggest flop in the known universe, in all the history of everything we’ve ever seen evidence of. Nothing compares.
But yes, ultimately, you do need to fix the root problem: agriculture. That’s not a cop-out, anymore than your doctor telling you not to worry about the cough or the sniffles or the fever, but to take the antibiotic to go after the root cause of the infection. But insurmountable? It’s very surmountable, it just takes some willingness to change is all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 July 2007 @ 11:38 AM
[quote]Greed isn’t inextricably tied to one consideration of others or another; it’s almost by definition unconcerned with what happens to others.[/quote]
This is what you said. This seems reasonable enough to me: as far as I can tell, this is how the word ‘greed’ is used. My dictionary defined greed as ‘excessive desire’. Can we say excessive due to the lack of concern with what happens to others? Or to put it yet another way: we call a desire for something ‘greed’ provided that this desire comes equipped with a lack of concern for what happens to others. (I’m pretty much just repeating myself here, restating the same thing. I’m doing so because I really want to make sure that we’re on the same page, that when you and I say ‘greed’, we mean the same thing.)
Now, if we agree on the above, then we should agree on the following as well: it is impossible to be greedy for reciprocal relationships. It’s impossible for me to wish to form a reciprocal relationship with you unless I consider your well-being as a good in its own right, and not merely as a tool for furthering my own interests (as in the case of a slave owner who is concerned for the well-being of his slaves because if they get sick or die, he loses money). And in fact, I’ve never heard of anyone being described as ‘greedy for friendship’ or ‘greedy for love’. It is, of course, possible to be greedy for certain kinds of relationships. We can talk about greed for celebrity, greed for romance, greed for attention, etc. But we aren’t talking about relationships that are reciprocal by definition here. We cannot talk about greed for love and friendship. You can desire love and friendship, very strongly even, but this desire simply doesn’t get labeled as ‘greed’. (If the phrase ‘greed for friendship/love’ makes sense to you, then either we don’t mean the same thing by ‘greed’ or we don’t mean the same thing by ‘love/friendship’. In fact, if this is the case, you might as well stop reading the rest of my post until we’ve figured out where the disagreement/misunderstanding lies.) It doesn’t even make sense to talk about ‘greed for allies’. It is possible to be greedy for something or other, and to determine that your best bet for getting that thing is to form as many alliances as possible. But in that case, the alliances are merely tools, not ends in and of themselves. You aren’t greedy for alliances, you are greedy for the thing that alliances are supposed to secure for you.
Do we agree so far?
Next, suppose I am a tribal person, and all of the sudden, I become greedy for something. I want to get it, and I don’t much care about whether my getting it will hurt or benefit anyone else. But, since I am a member of a tribe, my best bet for getting the thing that I oh so desire is to simultaneously work on getting something beneficial for the rest of the tribe. So to restate: I am furthering the interests of the tribe because that is the easiest way for me to get what I want; I don’t actually care whether anyone else benefits, and if it somehow turned out that, in this particular instance, it would be easier for me to get what I want by hurting the interests of my tribespeople, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the opportunity. (Again, if I am genuinely concerned for the well-being of others; if I see their well-being as a good in and of itself; if I am engaging in actions that lead to my obtaining whatever it is that I want both because I want to get whatever object it is that caught my fancy and because I’m genuinely interested in enhancing the well-being of others; if I would be perfectly willing to give up on this object if it turned out that my pursuit of it represented anything more/worse than a minor annoyance for others… Then we are not talking about greed.)
Now, assuming the set-up from the previous paragraph, how do people around me react to my greed? If people sense that the only reason I’m engaging in actions that are somehow beneficial to them is because I believe these actions to be conductive toward my obtaining the object of my fancy and otherwise don’t give a sh*t about whether anyone else gets anything that s/he cares about, then chances are, people aren’t going to see my actions in a positive light. (Just think about it for a moment. If you find out that your classmate Dave is keeping you company while you walk your dog, helping you with your homework, going to the swimming pool with you, etc. solely because your dad happens to be the soccer coach at your school and Dave would like to be chosen for the team but otherwise couldn’t care less about you, chances are, you aren’t going to be too pleased. In fact, you might even end up feeling used.) How big of an issue is this going to be? Well, it depends. If this happens only very occasionally, or if it’s only of a mild intensity, then chances are I’d merely become the object of a few light-hearted jokes. But if my greed was a permanent thing of considerable intensity? Then we’ve got a serious issue here. ‘How so?’, you might ask. Again, I’m a tribal person, and yet my goal isn’t to form reciprocal relationships (love/friendship), but rather to obtain something else, toward which end, I end up forming alliances. (Alliances, not friendships. If the only reason I’m associating with you and helping you enhance your well-being in some ways, is in order to get something external to you; if I don’t really care for you otherwise: then I’m your ally, not your friend.) Now if it is obvious to people around me that I only care about their well-being because they are useful to me in obtaining the object of my greed, then they are really not going to like it. Chances are, I’ll be looked down upon, possibly pitied, and it isn’t even impossible that, down the road, I’ll wind up exiled from the tribe. The only way to avoid trouble is for me to be really, really good at acting as though I really cared about these people. But we are talking day after day after day, for years, and constantly surrounded by the same small group of people. Nobody is that good of an actor. For a tribal person, the only way to consistently act as though s/he genuinely cared about his/her tribespeople’s well-being (again, as a good in and of itself, rather than merely as a tool for accomplishing some other goal) is to actually care about it. But if this is the case, then we aren’t talking about greed anymore.
To sum up. In a tribal context, nobody could possibly get away with intense, chronic greed. It is certainly possible to for a tribal person to be greedy from time to time, and tribes have ways of amortizing this without suffering any substantial harm. Does this make greed good? No. Greed is antithetical to relationship (see the beginning of this post), and therefore not good. It’s just that it’s not all that serious. (Kind of like a cold for an otherwise healthy person. Good? No. Just not that big of a deal.)
Of course, things are very different in a civilized context. For the members of the elite at least, furthering one’s interests with no regard for the well-being of those lower on the hierarchy (e.g. by hoarding wealth) is often perceived as a virtue (in the civilized context, the richest people are generally respected the most). And furthermore, in civilization, an intensely and chronically greedy person (i.e. a sociopath) has much better chances of never being exposed than s/he would have in a tribe, and this for the very simple reason that close, long-term personal relationships are not a must for civilized people. So if greed is in a tribe what a cold is for an otherwise healthy person, then greed is in civilization what a cold is for an AIDS patient. It’s bad in either case, it’s just a lot more serious in the latter.
Comment by Hasha — 19 July 2007 @ 7:55 PM
Jason, about the rape issue. No, I did not think you were trying to justify rape. And the issue is not whether rape is about power or lust. (It may be that it’s generally about lust, though I’m certain it’s sometimes about power, but that’s beside the point.) What I’ve got a problem with is your saying that the sexual attraction that a man deeply in love feels for his girlfriend is exactly the same as the sexual attraction that a man feels for a woman he’s about to rape.
You know, I really hope that all you meant was that both men experience the same kind of tingling at the tips of their penises, and nothing more.
On the other hand, what I had in mind… Sexual attraction for someone is the desire to have sex with that person. Now, what is the context of this desire in the case of a man deeply in love? Probably the most important thing here is that he wants to have sex with this particular woman. Angelina Jolie would not do, and neither would, for that matter, his girlfriend’s identical twin. No, he wants to have sex with his girlfriend, and with her alone, and he wants it because she is such am amazing person, and so kind, and so beautiful, and so witty, and so graceful, and so etc. Replace this particular woman with someone else, and the desire disappears. Because, for our lover-boy, sex is about forming a relationship with this woman. His desire to form a relationship with her, to bond with her, to be intimate with her, is inextricably linked to his desire to have sex with her. Even that tingling at the tip of his penis cannot be fully separated from this project of relationship forming. In the case of the rapist, things are completely different. Replace this woman with any other (or any other who looks sort of like her), and it won’t make the least bit of difference. The woman is nothing but an object whose sole purpose, as far as he is concerned, is to give him an orgasm.
Ultimately, the point is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t just fragment the lover’s (or the rapist’s) feelings. It’s not as though the lover’s feeling respect and tingling and admiration and tenderness and etc., and as though you could remove a part (say, respect), and keep the rest intact/unchanged. Remove respect, and the nature of sexual attraction changes, and the reason it changes is because this attraction doesn’t even exist apart from a context, and this context determines its very nature.
Comment by Hasha — 19 July 2007 @ 9:41 PM
Not to beat this issue to death… But I wanted to address the charge of circularity (‘it’s greed because it’s bad, and it’s bad because it’s greed’). Quite simply, there isn’t any.
If I say ‘It’s greed, therefore it’s bad,’ all I’m really doing is analyzing the concept of greed. (Kind of like saying ‘It’s scarlet, therefore it’s red.’ If I didn’t think it was red, I never would’ve called it scarlet.) I don’t know about you, but I don’t use the word ‘greed’ to describe a desire unless I feel there’s something wrong with it; it is my impression that this is the case with people in general. But it’s not the fact that a desire is greed that makes it bad. What makes the desire bad is the fact that it’s harmful to others (either in a direct sort of way, as when a person starts hoarding goods and thereby depriving others of those same goods, or in more subtle ways, as when it weakens a person’s commitment to strengthening intimate and reciprocal relationships). If it’s not harmful, well, I don’t know about you, but I won’t call it greed; I’ll call it something else. Because, for me, the word ‘greed’ is not a neutral, descriptive word (like ‘yellow’ or ‘tall’ or ‘wet’), but is a word that comes equipped with a value judgement. (Kind of like the word ‘spiteful.’ I won’t call you spiteful unless I think there’s a problem with you. Likewise, I won’t call you greedy unless I think there’s something wrong with your desire.)
As for ‘It’s bad, therefore it’s greed,’ we’re talking synthesis here. Suppose I see that you desire something. And suppose I feel that the thing that you want is not really necessary to you (it would be both ridiculous and offensive to attach the label ‘greedy’ to a person who hasn’t eaten in a week and is therefore incapable of thinking of anything other than food). And suppose, furthermore, that I think that your desire is somehow harmful to other people and to relationships among people (including nonhuman people, as Derrick Jensen likes to put it). Under these circumstances, I think it’s safe to call your desire ‘bad.’ Now, if all these factors are present, then I will label your desire ‘greed.’ But I won’t first call it greed for unrelated reasons and then based on that infer it’s bad. I’ll first conclude (or merely sense: it doesn’t have to be a conscious/explicit judgement) the desire is bad/harmful, and then I’ll say it’s greed.
So there is no circularity.
Comment by Hasha — 20 July 2007 @ 1:36 PM
Keep in mind that the medieval (worktime)
figures given include a goodly portion of
time spent working for the lord of the manor,
i.e. turning the product over to the lord.
How much time/product? I don’t know.
20%? 50%? Anyone? –Alan
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today’s
from The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor
See also: Productivity and the Workweek
and: Eight centuries of annual hours The labouring man will take his rest long in the morning; a good piece of the day is spent afore he come at his work; then he must have his breakfast, though he have not earned it at his accustomed hour, or else there is grudging and murmuring; when the clock smiteth, he will cast down his burden in the midway, and whatsoever he is in hand with, he will leave it as it is, though many times it is marred afore he come again; he may not lose his meat, what danger soever the work is in. At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon, which spendeth a great part of the day; and when his hour cometh at night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools, leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth.
-James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, ca. 1570
One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit — but rarely articulated — assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
Therefore, we must take a longer view and look back not just one hundred years, but three or four, even six or seven hundred. Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”
An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day’s work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two “days-works.”[2] Detailed accounts of artisans’ workdays are available. Knoop and jones’ figures for the fourteenth century work out to a yearly average of 9 hours (exclusive of meals and breaktimes)[3]. Brown, Colwin and Taylor’s figures for masons suggest an average workday of 8.6 hours[4].
The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official — that is, church — holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales — to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5]
The peasant’s free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor — the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work “by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day.” And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income — which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year — 175 days — for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
Sources
[1] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 542-43.
[2] H.S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 104-6.
[3] Douglas Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 105.
[4] R. Allen Brown, H.M. Colvin, and A.J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works, vol. I, the Middle Ages (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1963).
[5] Edith Rodgers, Discussion of Holidays in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 10-11. See also C.R. Cheney, “Rules for the observance of feast-days in medieval England”, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 34, 90, 117-29 (1961).
Eight centuries of annual hours
13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours
Calculated from Gregory Clark’s estimate of 150 days per family, assumes 12 hours per day, 135 days per year for adult male (”Impatience, Poverty, and Open Field Agriculture”, mimeo, 1986)
14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours
Calculated from Nora Ritchie’s estimate of 120 days per year. Assumes 12-hour day. (”Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II”, in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, vol. II, London: Edward Arnold, 1962).
Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hours
Juliet Schor’s estime of average medieval laborer working two-thirds of the year at 9.5 hours per day
1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours
Calculated from Ian Blanchard’s estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day (”Labour productivity and work psychology in the English mining industry, 1400-1600″, Economic History Review 31, 23 (1978).
1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours
Based on 69-hour week; hours from W.S. Woytinsky, “Hours of labor,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1935). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours
Based on 70-hour week; hours from Joseph Zeisel, “The workweek in American industry, 1850-1956″, Monthly Labor Review 81, 23-29 (1958). Low estimate assumes 45 week year, high one assumes 52 week year
1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours
From The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor, Table 2.4
1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
Calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Office of Productivity and Technology
Comment by alan2012 — 24 July 2007 @ 5:03 PM
Notable… from the item above:
“All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.[5] ”
….. and that’s still assuming that the serf is
working for some lord, and turning over
some (whatever) fraction of his/her product
to the lord. In other words, if said fraction
could be retained instead of turned over,
then the goldbricking time could be
extended to perhaps 6 or 7 months per
year, or even longer.
Doesn’t sound too bad.
Plenty of time for feasting, drinking,
merry-making, resting…
Comment by alan2012 — 24 July 2007 @ 5:19 PM
Further:
“An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day’s work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two “days-works.”[2] Detailed accounts of artisans’ workdays are available. Knoop and jones’ figures for the fourteenth century work out to a yearly average of 9 hours (exclusive of meals and breaktimes)[3]. Brown, Colwin and Taylor’s figures for masons suggest an average workday of 8.6 hours[4]. ”
……… well, hard to say. “Exclusive of meals and breaktimes” — breaktimes like holidays, feast days, etc.? In other words, was the real daily average, all things accounted for, 9 hours, or (say) 5? One cannot tell from this without looking up the references.
One other thing: the level of agri/horticultural sophistication of medieval times was not high, to put it mildly. I have read (and could document this, given time) of grain yields as low as 15 bushels per cultivated acre — extremely low. In terms of caloric count that is in the rough neighborhood of 1/10th to 1/40th of what is possible with modern permacultural techniques. Hence, if the medieval peasant actually did work as much as 40 hours per week (and it appears that it could have been half that or less; cannot tell), the same labor, given more sophisticated techniques, could possibly yield vastly more product. OR, much preferably, VASTLY LESS LABOR could yield the same product, hence vastly more time for drinking, carousing, goofing-off, Bacchic revelry, trouble-making, etc.
Time goes on and things change… including potential yields from agri/horticulture.
Comment by alan2012 — 24 July 2007 @ 5:51 PM
Correction (on the off chance that anyone is still listening): the “1/10th to 1/40th”, you might have noticed, must be exaggerated. Intensive permacultural technic is considerably more labor-intensive, I have no doubt, than medieval farming, acre for acre. But even adjusting for that, there is a large favorable margin. Instead of spending 30-40 hours per week (perhaps the typical medieval requirement), 10-20 might work just fine. That’s not to mention NOT having to give 1/3rd (or whatever) of the yield to the feudal lord. Hey, I think it’s a plan!
Comment by alan2012 — 25 July 2007 @ 12:55 AM
Hey, since no one is listening anyway, I’m going to indulge myself and post this item. It is a fine review of the oft-ignored characteristics of medieval life. The medieval interval gave us an APPROXIMATE model (with warts, granted) of a sustainable and convivial society. I’m not the first to have noticed this. The writer of this item encapsulates it nicely……
http://www.idler.co.uk/books/how-to-be-free/
How to be Free
BACK IN 1983, in an inter view with broadcaster Brian Walden, Mrs Thatcher caught the public imagination with her promotion of “Victorian values”:
Walden: You’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values. The sort of values, if you like, that helped to build the country throughout the 19th century. Now is that right?
Thatcher: Exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country.
Now what did the Victorians value, exactly? Well, the 19th century was the era of hard work, exploitation, greed, chimney sweeps, 16-hour days, tall black hats, money-worship and strict discipline in the home. It was the era when the dark Satanic mills destroyed the cottage industry and lives began to be lived around the clock rather than by the seasons. It was the era of steam, coal and gas. It was the era that introduced the notion of the earth as a resource to be mined. It was the era of competitive living. It was the era of soul-deadening machinery. Anyone who doubts this has only to read Dickens.
These values motivated the Eighties and they are still the dominant ones today. Well, I for one am thoroughly fed up with Victorian values which is why in my new book, called How To Be Free, I propose instead a return to medieval values.
On first sight, this idea seems bonkers. Surely the medieval age was a time of bad diets, corrupt priests and abject serfdom? Well, no. This view is actually a calumnious caricature. When I started to write How To Be Free, I decided to read Mutual Aid by the great 19th- century anarchist Prince Petr Kropotkin, described by Oscar Wilde as one of the most cheerful men he had ever met. In Mutual Aid, published at the same time as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Kropotkin argues that cooperation is an essential part of animal and human life and development. He also reminds us that it was in the medieval age when the great free city-states such as Florence were created. The medievals, he says, valued craftsmanship, cooperation and justice. Mutual Aid led me to read other books on medieval customs and culture, and what I found was a society that made a sustained and conscious attempt to live fairly and justly.
The two great influences on the development of medieval ethics were Christ’s sermon on the mount and Aristotle’s Ethics, which had come to Europe via Arab translations. From this material they developed an approach to life which was eco-friendly, neighbourly and based on cooperating rather than competing. So here, briefly, is an introduction to 10 important medieval values, all of which seem radical to us:
ANTI-CAPITALIST: Lending at interest, or usury, is at the basis of the capitalist system. And usury was quite specifically proscribed by medieval ethics. It was sinful, they said, to sell something that does not belong to you, which is time. It was also sinful to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune by lending them money. Usurers were sometimes known to return all the money they had made on their deathbed, in an effort to ensure their salvation. Money was for spending, not for saving or lending.
ANTI-WORK: According to historian Jacques Le Goff, the medievals were opposed to hard work, because, he says, to put in long hours displayed a lack of faith in Providence. Theologically, medieval Catholicism was closer to an almost Taoist Oriental fatalism than today’s Protestant culture. And hard work might give you an unfair advantage over your brothers.
ANTI-COMPETITIVE: Craftsmen organised themselves into a system of Guilds. Guild members mutually agreed to keep quality high and prices uncompetitive. They instituted the notion of a “just and fixed price” for their wares. Goods were produced in small groups. This practice guarded against today’s problem which is giant companies producing a load of rubbish.
ECO-FRIENDLY: In the era before electricity, coal, gas or nuclear power, the medievals heated themselves from sustainable sources: ie, wood. They used water and wind power to grind corn. The UK was covered in eco-friendly windmills. All vegetable production was necessarily organic, and everyone “shopped local”. There were no supermarkets or call centres or lorries or cars. No logos, either. And crucially, no plastic. Therefore there was no waste as everything was returned to to the earth.
SELF-SUFFICIENT: Even the meanest medieval peasant grew vegetables and herbs and kept pigs and chickens. And the giant yeoman class became very prosperous. Chaucer wrote of his Franklin: “It snowed in his house of mete and drynke.”
HOSPITABLE: Just as indigenous people today would share their last crust with you, so the medievals emphasised the importance of good hospitality. The monasteries would take in wandering men and give them beer, bread and bacon, and indeed, the (later) problem of homeless, in the Elizabethan age, was a direct result of the destruction of the monasteries.
CHARITABLE: In the days before charity had become just another institutional mega-business, it really did begin at home. The importance of charity was constantly insisted upon and there were plenty of wandering beggars and other mendicants who were ready to receive your alms. There was no disgrace attached to poverty: in fact, it was a state to be celebrated, because the apostles were poor. We had the example of St Francis of Assisi who became voluntarily poor.
PARTY-LOVING: The medieval calendar was absolutely studded with feast days and festivals. Of course, we all celebrate Christmas now, but Christmas then was celebrated for 12 days, during which no one was allowed to work. Every three or four weeks there was some excuse for a party. May Day was for having sex and every three of four weeks there was a long break.
CHIVALROUS: It was the medieval knights and specifically the great Troubadours of Southern France who invented the custom of courtly love. Chivalry, respect and courtesy towards women was constantly insisted upon, and there were great female patrons of these poets, such as, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Good manners were important.
NEIGHBOURLY: Christ had conceived of the world as a “brotherhood of man” and civility to your neighbour was paramount. This is because the medievals had a sense of collective responsibility: we are all in this together, so your well-being and my well-being are one and the same thing.
Medieval values were radical values. They were good values. And they were enjoyable values. We should embrace them.
The Freedom Manifesto
BAKE BREAD
MUCK ABOUT
QUIT MOANING
STOP CONSUMING
START PRODUCING
BACK TO THE LAND
SMASH USURY
EMBRACE BEAUTY
IGNORE THE STATE
REFORM IS FUTILE
HAIL THE SPADE
HAIL THE QUILL
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
BE CREATIVE
DIG THE EARTH
MAKE COMPOST
DOWN WITH HEALTH
DOWN WITH SAFETY
DOWN WITH WORK
DOWN WITH PENSIONS
BE ALIVE
BE MERRY
Be Free!
Comment by alan2012 — 25 July 2007 @ 1:31 AM
One MORE thing, on another topic.
For anyone interested in animism…
(I can post the full text of this article if anyone would like; send request with this page’s url to aelewis AT provide DOT net)
http://www.sciencedirect.com
Medical Hypotheses
Volume 68, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 727-
doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2006.11.004
Copyright © 2006 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
Editorial
Alienation, recovered animism and altered states of consciousness
Bruce G. Charlton , Editor-in-Chief – Medical Hypotheses
Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, UK
Available online 4 December 2006.
Summary
Alienation is the feeling that life is ‘meaningless’, that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter–gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have ‘minds’, to be ‘alive’, to be sentient agents. The animistic thinker inhabits a world populated by personal powers including not just other human beings, but also important animals and plants, and significant aspects of physical landscape. Humans belong in this world because it is a web of social relationships. Animism is therefore spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans: all humans began as animistic children and for most of human evolutionary history would have grown into animistic adults. It requires sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world. It is this learned abstraction that creates alienation – humans are no longer embedded in a world of social relations but become estranged, adrift in a world of indifferent things. Methods used to cure alienation and recover animistic modes of thinking involve detachment from the social systems that tend to maintain objectivity and rationality: for example, solitude, leisure, unstructured time and direct contact with nature. Many people also achieve similar results by deliberately inducing altered states of consciousness. Animistic thinking may emerge in meditation or contemplation, lucid dreaming, from self-hypnosis, when drowsy, in ‘trance states’ induced by repetitious rhythm or light, or when delirious due to illness, brain injury, psychoses, or intoxication with ‘entheogenic’ drugs – which is probably one reason for the perennial popularity of inducing intoxicated states. However, intoxication will typically damage memory processes making it harder to learn from any spiritual experiences; and even mild states of cognitive impairment may be dangerous in situations where skilled or responsible behaviour is required. Despite these constraints and limitations, recovering animism through seeking altered states of consciousness could already be considered a major world spiritual practice.
Article Outline
Animism
At home in the world
Recovering animism through altered states of consciousness
The ‘entheogenic’ rationale for intoxication
References
[…snip…]
Comment by alan2012 — 25 July 2007 @ 1:40 AM
alan2012,
Great links and articles. I’ve seen the one about medieval workdays before, but not medieval values. I still think that foraging is the most sensible for us, and the relative leisure compared to 19th and 20th-century life doesn’t make up for the destructiveness of agriculture and the frequency of famine, but it does illustrate just how far off we’ve come in this era from the lesiure and cooperative-ness of our birthright.
And the idea that life has no meaning- I wondered to myself a few months back how we ever got to that point, and this animism brief speaks to that. Can you email me the full text of it?
Thanks much!
Comment by Archangel — 25 July 2007 @ 6:14 AM
Think about that for a second. Not just the Middle Ages, but all agrarian societies, had about 90% of the population involved in some form of serfdom. If they were all supporting themselves on 50% of their labor, and sending the other 50% to their lord, then you would have half the food in the realm eaten by 90% of the people, and half of it eaten by 10%. Now, there was a lot of wealth disparity, to be sure, but simply physiologically, the human body can’t handle that much food.
In actual point of fact, most agrarian societies had something along the lines of a 10% tithe. The other 90% they kept to live off of. So it was generally about 10% of their labor time that went to the elites.
But more importantly, we’re talking as if this is a mundane detail, as if agriculture could work just fine without the elites sucking off of it. Those elites are the only thing that keeps agriculture going. Without them, it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Without their laws and imprisonment, it will always be cheaper and easier (to say nothing of more fun) to slip into more permaculture, do a little fishing, do a little hunter, and what you end up with eventually is a bunch of foragers. Agriculture is the most energy inefficient mode of subsistence we’ve ever used, by far, and it’s only justifiable when you have to produce food for a non-producing elite.
This is true, but don’t take it too far. They only had the Sabbath off, and before the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition, not even that. It was a medieval proverb that G-d had put 24 hours into a day: 8 for work, 8 for play, and 8 for rest. Even with all the breaks Bishop Pilkington describes, you’re still talking about eight hours of hard work out in the fields every day. That’s still liesurely compared to the 60-70 hour weeks so many people work today, but it’s still agonizing compared to a forager’s 6-hour work week.
The U.S. is one of the most stingy industrialized countries in terms of time off, but you still get weekends and about two weeks of vacation a year, on average, or about 118 days, or about a third of the year.
That had more to do with exhausted soils than technological sophistication. Notice that when the same techniques were applied in the New World, you had visible differences in height between colonists and their European contemporaries.
It’s pretty clear that it was about 48 hours a week.
Sure, but so much of that owes to the greater productivity of ecological edge, and that can’t simply be multiplied by acreage. It doesn’t scale up. Permaculture is the same as what anthropologists call horticulture, and that does require far less effort. It’s more work than foraging, but calorie-for-calorie, it is the most efficient means of subsistence humans have ever used, in stark contrast to agriculture, which is the least efficient by far. Neither do horticulturalists need to work for some lord. But, because it doesn’t scale, you’re not talking about an agrarian lifestyle with cities and the rest–you’re talking about village life, and the community garden, which your average European wouldn’t be able to distinguish from the forest.
As I wrote in “The Hyperbole of St. Jerome” and “The Middle Ages & Roman Collapse: Similarities & Differences,” the collapse of the Roman Empire did improve quality of life in Europe, but that’s a far cry from suggesting that it made it anything like sustainable. See also, “The Age of Exuberance.” Medieval Europe quickly scaled back up to the expansiveness of the Roman Empire, and quickly ran into the limits of expansion, such that plague and famine became necessary ecological checks on population. It was that situation that made Columbus’ discovery so much more important than Lief Eriksson’s.
Charleton’s essay is actually something of a favorite around here, though.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 July 2007 @ 11:37 AM
The discussion about gods and agriculture is interesting. But didn’t even animist cultures believe in a power related to the Earth, such as a Great Spirit?
Comment by Taylor — 28 July 2007 @ 10:20 PM
The animists believed in a great number of powers rooted in the earth, but the “Great Spirit” was not among them. Abram does a pretty good job in Spell of the Sensuous of identifying concepts like Wakan with the wind.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 July 2007 @ 10:35 PM
The plot seems intriguing. There seems a lot to uncover as the plot progresses..
Comment by hirota — 29 July 2008 @ 1:01 AM