Anti-civilization, and what that means...

(Update July 12 2010: There is a more up-to-date post on anti-civilization anarchy, though it contains less of my own words than this one, if you want to check that out as well!)

I tend to go for long periods of time writing (or lately vlogging) about fairly light, everyday stuff. But after I've been doing that for a while, I start to get restless and feel like writing a political post again... And that's what's happening now!

I only really realized recently (try saying 'really realized recently' ten times fast :-P) that I'm actually, along with being anarchist, anti-civilization. I've held those views for a while, but only recently realized that those views had a name! Now, when people hear 'anti-civilization' their first reaction is often horror. They seem to feel it's as good as saying 'anti-human', although nothing could be further from the truth.

Anti-civilizationists, also called beyond civilizationists and anarcho-primitivists, believe that civilization is fundamentally unsustainable and against the way that humans are supposed to live, against the lifestyle that will bring them the most fulfillment. So what exactly do I mean when I say civilization? I really like Derrick Jensen's definition of civilization, which is:

"A culture--that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts--that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, with cities being defined--so as to distinguish from camps, villages, and so on--as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life."

The key problem with that is importation, since for that you NEED violence. A people that has been living in the same place for millenia, eating the fish from the local streams, and living in harmony with the cyclical seasons, will not freely give up their land, give up their home, just because someone else desires the fish in the streams and the trees that shelter them. So that's where violence comes in. It has happened numerous times with aboriginal peoples the world over, and continues to happen today, that the ruling powers, the so called "first world countries" (the US, Canada, Britain etc.), take the resources at gunpoint, by threat, by cultural genocide. One of the most common responses when someone here expresses disgust for government, for our society, is that "you should be happy you're not in China (or Pakistan, or Africa...)". What those people don't seem to realize is that everything we have here, from oil, to food, to the clothes on our backs, is at the expense of poor people, of aboriginal people, of the natural world and all who dwell in it, the whole world over. And some people don't understand how that leads to being against civilization as a whole. Instead, they want to stop all those abuses without getting rid of civilization altogether. And that's were anti-civilizationists disagree. I don't think that's possible. For cities to exist, resources need to come from somewhere. And if they're coming from somewhere else, that means that the place the ruling powers are stealing resources from is suffering.

I feel like I should have more to say, but I think what I've said sums it up nicely. To be truly sustainable, a community has to be able to sustain itself for an indefinite period of time without the importation of any resources. Another thing people say in disgust is that if anarcho-primitivists or anti-civilizationists hate civilization so much, they should just go live in the woods. I have several problems with that statement. 1. What good would that do? If I believe that civilization is inherently destructive and will continue destroying the world until it collapses, then hiding in the woods isn't a very effective way of protecting what natural world is left. Instead, I think it's a much better idea to preserve as much as we can, to stop those destroying the world in whatever way we can, as well as learning how to survive withoutt our civilization. 2. The person making that statement assumes I want civilization to collapse, and that I somehow want people to suffer. That is so amazingly wrong! In my heart, I wish this civilization could last. I love the city, I love my computer, I love being able to browse at the library... But I also love the trees, and the lakes, and the whales that swim in the ocean. And when it comes down to it, I know that this civilization is going down. An unsustainable culture has condemned itself from the moment it started. We think we can have all the good without the bad, but that's impossible. Every action has consequences, and our civilization has committed a lot of actions that they've yet to realize have some truly enormous consequences.

People also seem to think that because I believe that civilization will fall, I must somehow always be depressed. That I must be a miserable person. And I'm not. At all. Once again, I'll draw on Jensen for this quote:

"People sometimes ask me, 'If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?' The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good."

Contrary to making me depressed, it's extremely freeing. I used to be depressed a lot. I knew that things were fucked up. I knew that most of the people I knew were miserable. But I didn't understand it. And now I do. I can see all the flaws, all the problems, all the amazingly fucked up things, but now I know why. I know who to blame. It isn't just generally messed up, it's something I can trace and see and understand. So I'm not depressed. I'm angry, yes, and sometimes amazingly sad. But I'm also really fucking happy. I love life, my family, the stillness of a lake at dawn, the sound of the wind through Poplar trees... And I can know, even though I've been born into what is perhaps one of the hardest times in history (history being civilization), a time where real change is brewing on the horizon, that I am truly blessed to simply be alive.

Peace,
Idzie