Rant on Civilization & War
Bush is not responsible for the war in Iraq. Al Gore said during his campaign against Bush II that Bush I should have finished the job; and we never tire of pretending these days that the Clinton-Gore government was not attacking Iraq…. they were, regularly and lethally. War is inherent to civilization; and that is why we’ll have more and more of it, and why it will eventually percolate from the peripheries populated by Dark Others into our suburbs.
Everything we have that we list in our catalogue of civilization is forged out of fraud, theft, and murder. The cities of the world are built up on fraud, theft, and murder. Show me the exception, and I’ll take it back.
Mike Polacheck:
A fine analysis. I have put it more simply that civilization is a criminal enterprize. In “Beyond Civilization” Danial Quinn looks for an alternative in reviving tribalism. Is it possible to live non-exploitatively? This my be the most basic question.
21 February 2007, 1:26 pmskol:
I know arguments aren’t that static, but maybe there should be a place or way to develop arguments/counter-arguments. At places like HuffPo, there aren’t nearly enough subject experts to reply to someone like the pretentious and insufferable DWatkins (thou wert expecting accolades? Aaa-Hahaha! You shall get none from me!!). Even with more sensible people, the same arguments come up.
I don’t know if this is a dumb idea, but maybe there oughta be a cheat-sheet somewhere to give us a little more leeway on the ‘net.
For example, DWatkins resorts to the George Carlin approach (laughable, really): “we pose no threat to Earth, and how egotistical is it for us to think we can do anything at all, and that if Earth wanted to, it’d shake us all off like a bunch of fleas.”
That’s directly from the Carlin skit “The environment is fine, the people are fucked”. I don’t remember what album it’s on.
File it under Environment->The Flea Approach.
And then there’s Striker5’s “We’re fucked, so just give up!” approach, joined with the “Things can’t change because this is how it’s always been” assumption, and the ever-present “God is in this sentence, so it’s meaningful” assumption…Is that a tautology, btw? I don’t really know how to use that word, but I have read at least 10 definitions for it.
Not to mention all the…
A: men = human
B: but human = men & women
A: stop controlling my language!!1!
B: but language = power
A: that’s beside the point! stop controlling my language!!1!
B: I’m not controlling your language. The issue isn’t that you said it, it’s what you mean every time you say it.
A: *pause* …Yes you are! And here are the infinite irrelevant responses I can make for it: [infinity - validity]
….arguments.
Anyway, I hope I’m not being too hybristic suggesting the cheat-sheet/taxonomy-of-arguments thinger. We could have quizzes listing all the fallacies of a given post!
21 February 2007, 7:38 pmDeAnander:
It’s my fault, I turned Stan on to Derrick Jensen
and now he’s out there in the intellectual wilderness with the rest of us who have started to query the defensibility of “civilisation” itself (organised humans living in cities). This is a distressing point to come to in one’s political/moral critique, as it would invalidate 100 pct of the conditions of our lives from childhood on; it also destroys the conventional Marxian/capitalist dogma of Development and Industrialisation and the sectarian Marxist focus on the industrial proletariat as historical saviours.
Bookchin makes some counterarguments for the validity of the polis — but not the cosmopolis — of appropriate size fully integrated into a surrounding agrarian economy (Limits of the City)… Ran Prieur was way out there ahead of me in speculating about the Crash, what forms it might take, and (this is the most disturbing question) whether it would really be such a Bad Thing if Western Civ as we know it disappeared, or mutated into something quite different.
more later…
21 February 2007, 8:25 pmFire Witch:
I came to Jensen via the anarcho-primitivism of John Zerzan.
One word of caution, however. I have seen folks who get excited about the critique of civilization come full circle back to pseudo-christianity by positing Agriculture as original sin (plant one ear o-corn and yer lost!).
Just my two cents. Glad to know ya’ll took the red pill, too…
21 February 2007, 9:17 pmskol:
I was really excited after reading the excerpts for Jensen’s book (http://www.endgamethebook.org). There’s a lot of them, at least 10 chapters. I don’t think that link is over at IA, either.
21 February 2007, 9:53 pmRandy Morris:
Hey De, is “End Game” worth a read (either or both volumes) considering the scope of what we discuss and read in conjunction with this site? I saw it at the bookstore last week and got curious…it looks like quite the masterwork.
Randy
21 February 2007, 11:18 pmDeAnander:
@skol Jensen demolishes all these classic responses — from denial to do-nothingism to know-nothingism — in the Endgame duology.
@firewitch I think there’s a significant difference between condemning farming per se — the whole realm of humans cultivating plants for food and fibre — and condemning specifically “agri-culture,” the cultivation of the ploughed field for (mostly) grain crops, which is the focus of increasing critique. we don’t have a strong consensus at the moment on the meaning of these words — much as we ludicrously say “conventionally grown” for crops grown by insane fossil-intensive and toxic methods introduced only in the last 50 years — our language is so polluted by technocratic and capitalist assumptions; but as a starting point several scholars have pointed out that the “sublime wilderness” of N America so much admired by the Anglo invaders, was not wilderness at all in many cases but permacultivation by the indigenous people, with plant life encouraged, guided and tended (the “food forest” concept) by human denizens. Richard Manning’s critique of the Wheat/Beef culture and the destructive aspects of Western agriculture I think are spot-on; Jules Pretty tackles and deconstructs the unnecessarily harsh dichotomy in our Western minds between “cultivated” (i.e. taylorised, regimented) land and “natural” land; and a whole forest (or prairie) of writers and farmers are asking whether humans can permacultivate land with intensive polyculture in such a way that we actually increase soil health and biodiversity instead of wrecking biosystems wherever we go. Vandana Shiva among others documents the sustainability of traditional Indian peasant farming techniques — the same land farmed for generation after generation without significant deterioration, a sharp contrast to the deserts and die-offs produced by over-irrigation, overgrazing and consequent soil depletion in the ancient “Fertile Crescent” and the contemporary Western nations… oh hell, I could go on, but the invention of regimented agri-culture, the plough and furrow and the monocrop plantation, is as good an historical stand-in for Original Sin as I need for the moment… from this point of departure we inherit the hacienda system, slave labour, the corvee, various priestly and kingly hierarchies and caste systems….
Pollan’s chapter on maize and its takeover of the US corporate agricultural food chain is a good illustration of an ear of corn symbolising sin; but corn planted in the traditional symbiotic “Three Sisters” hill as First Nations folks did for thousands of years is a different kettle of, er, carbs… those who long to return to “pure” gatherer-hunting I think are (a) strangely complacent about the massive human die-off this would require, and (b) kind of ignorant about perma/polyculture as practised by both sessile and nomadic early peoples.
@randy imho anything by Jensen is worth a read. agree or disagree, one is still likely to have one’s world-view expanded. his books follow an arc of narrative and analysis and it’s hard for me to recommend the later titles in isolation; they are all more or less part of one long work (rather like Illich’s). in A Language Older than Words he discusses patriarchy and male violence, and the experience of growing up with an abusive father; in Strangely Like War he discusses how patriarchal, macho military language, metaphors and fantasies persist over time among professional loggers who literally see their work as a “war” on the forest. Welcome to the Machine discusses the culture of surveillance and high-tech totalitarianism. The Culture of Make-Believe I think is an important prerequisite for really getting a grip on Endgame; each book refers back to previous ones (so that he doesn’t have to do entire analyses all over again in each book, I suppose). if I had to recommend a reading plan (the Essential Jensen or whatever), it would be The Culture of Make-Believe followed by Endgame I and II if you liked TCMB, and then maybe going back to pick up the earlier titles if you get enthusiastic about the author.
in TCMB he makes the case that civilisation is not defensible; in EG 1 and 2 he completes that case and then talks about how civilisation might end or be brought down, and about how/if it is possible to live embedded in it, as we all do, and yet live in active resistance to it. much of EG focusses on an important issue in his native NW, the destruction of salmon populations by dams. this fundamental moral question hovers over the entire work: at what point, if ever, do we declare our loyalty to our land base and the biotic systems that support us as a higher priority, a higher loyalty, than our fealty or indenture to electric companies, governments, consumer society, etc? at what point will we defend our landbases?
it is a troubling question and one which has haunted me ever since reading EG 1 and 2. Jensen paints the futility of our present tactics (environmentalists’ tactics, that is) with devastating candour. we are losing. the biotic infrastructure of our lives is being stripped and destroyed at an ever-accelerating pace. we are not just trying to save charismatic megafauna, we are in danger ourselves. so when, and how, will we act? he asks this question not as some macho EFer waving a monkey wrench from the top of the barricades, but as an ordinary unmacho man just as afraid of police violence and prison brutality (he teaches writing in prisons) and State persecution as the rest of us, asking himself what it will take for him to act before the salmon are extinct.
heartily recommended. Jensen is one of the few male enviros who makes the connection between patriarchy and exterminism. this is why I suspected that Stan would find his work very congenial, and given the amount of Jensen that has seeped quickly into IA I think I may have been right
sure I could pick a nit here and a nit there, but in general I think Jensen is on the right side of whatever struggle it is we are all embedded in, the struggle of our time, whatever we want to call it, between the power of totalising capitalism and the health and diversity of life on the thin outer crust of this planet.
22 February 2007, 12:11 amRequired:
DeAnander,
22 February 2007, 7:30 amWell done getting Stan, and more people in general, onto Jensen. I mentioned him a while back but it didn’t seem to click.
Mark E. Smith:
Endgame is the most important book you will ever read.
The patriarchal values of civilization require that we destroy ourselves, all other living things, and as much of the planet as we can.
If, however, that keeps us from metastacizing into space, I suppose it could be a good thing. Not for me personally, or for my grandkids, but for the universe.
In Vol. 2 of Endgame, Jensen talks about resistance. Gaia’s natural immunities appear to have been long since overwhelmed and it is good that we can at least talk about, and some can even commit acts of resistance. At best though, most of us can only attempt to minimize the harm we do. If nothing else, it proves that many of us are not criminally insane and that we have some remnant of survival instinct left.
A pleasure to see something worth reading at HuffPo.
22 February 2007, 10:28 amStan:
Jensen is very compelling because he writes so damn well. My own first glimmerings of all this civilization stuff came with Mark Jones, Rosa Luxemburg, Robert Biel, and Alf Hornborg… and the cognitive gates were world systems theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Energy War states more than once, and with no equivocation, that capitalism’s navigation system is aiming us over a cliff… and it won’t be the first time.
De and I seem to find people who are willing enough to accept the rather grim implications of the whole core-periphery dans du mort; but we still seem to be struggling to make the connection clear (as it seems to us) between the serial social suicides of civilization and the patriarchal conquest trope.
My argument with Jensen, and probably with Bookchin as well — but I admit I haven’t studied him yet, so I’ll reserve judgment — is that he lays out a problem (as many on the left do), and then stumbles on how to respond.
It’s very easy, as Jensen does, to say that there is a difference between reform and revolution, and that all reform is a mere palliative. It’s also wrong. It makes the leap from stating a very real problem to positing (by default) adventurism as the only solution. So we end up with a small cadre of lone-wolf Foreman-esque monkey-wrenchers acting in a a leaderless resistance… and no account whatsoever of capacity or, more importantly, the masses.
I love what I’m reading in Jensen, and he lays out the problem very well. The void, and it’s a big void, is where do we go from here? Real life doesn’t give revolutionaries the luxury of stating what “must be done” or else. There are real limits that are mapped directly onto the combination of material dependency and consciousness that stabilize the system as it currently is. Saying “we have to” doesn’t change that.
Identifying how to move forward, from where we actually are, begins with two things: (1) a relatively accurate overall intelligence estimate (I sound like the Pentagon here, haha) and (2) a realistic account of “our” capacity.
No group has ever “made” a revolution; and no group ever will. Revolutions are a transfer of collapse of power that occurs when there is a complete phase transition in the current social order. This kind of phase transition happens only when there are contradictory elements within the system that fatally weaken it. This is not a denial of human agency; it is an account of it that includes its limitations in the face of larger systemic stability.
I am writing a lot about all this in The Insurgent’s Handbook that I’ll publish via Lulu in a couple of months.
One somewhat schematic way (and here, my Leninism is still active) of seeing this is in three dimensions: Economic, Political, and Coercive (as in military or police). Unless there is a state of crisis in all three dimensions, the stable aspect of the system always holds down the fort while the other two can be rationalized. EG, if there is an economic crisis, but the political apparatus still has legitimacy and the security apparatus is intact, then there is no possibility of the kind of general crisis that prefigures collapse (and revolutionary opportunity).
That’s why the US State Department always attempts a three-pronged destabilization in advance of conducting coups against foreign governments - economic isolation and disruption, political delegitimation, and a security crisis of some kind. This worked in Haiti a couple years back, and failed in Venezuela when the security apparatus proved itself loyal to the Constitution.
When there is no revolutionary conjuncture in the offing (for now), the only way to strengthen popular organization is through so-called (by Jensen) “palliatives.” Reforms simultaneously construct the social-political networks (a prerequisite for any future efforts), strengthen popular forces by what is won in reform struggles (the Civil Rights movement was a reform movement), and instructs the masses in practice about the limits of their own power in the current system (which all our preaching cannot do as effectively).
Marxist prognostication and orthodoxy (to which Marx did NOT subscribe… it happened after his death) said the industrial proletariat would midwife the industrial utopia; and we know that is now pretty much an article of faith only among the self-deluded. But Marxist methods of inquiry and the framework of dialectical (non-linear, dynamic) materialism are still indispensable to organizing, imho. Because it always asks the question, How do we get there from here?
The adventurism of leaderless monkey-wrenchers will be met with not only a security apparatus that will swallow them like a phagocyte envelops a foreign body but with massive public approval of their destruction.
The reality is that we have lost much and will lose more before our time comes. These are just the realities on the ground. That is not an excuse to give up. There is a disturbing cultural Calvinism about this all-or-nothing approach, and it can be as individualistic as Calvinism is… all about personal salvation. Our work needs to be fearless in its accounting of relative strength and weakness and bear an ethical imperative against despair and demobilizaiton. It’s kind of a soldier’s notion, and I apologize for that.
All that said, Derrick Jensen is a must-read. Endgame is a macro-intelligence document.
22 February 2007, 10:56 amCharles:
The problem with agriculture at its origin was that it was coincident with the origin of exploiting and exploited classes and male supremacy. The idea of producing surpluses to get through hardtimes is not a bad idea. But somehow, the division of labor between predominantly mental and predomiantly physical workers got warped into exploiting and exploited classes.
Today, we don’t have to get rid of agriculture that produces surpluses, i.e. production of more food than needed by the immediate producers of food. We have to get rid of exploiting-oppressing/exploited-oppressed classes and male supremacy Capitalism is that last class divided/ male supremacist society.
22 February 2007, 12:34 pmxenia:
A couple of thoughts, mostly on civilization, motivated by the link to R. Prieur and some of the discussions I’ve seen here:
First: Former empires were exceedingly exploitative as well, but since the nineteenth century, exploitation and destruction of the earth has been increased manifold because of the specific capitalist ideology of progress and growth, and because the technological possibilities were expanded as well.
This is of course very basic knowledge, but I am repeating it because there is a tendency to compare “civilizations” abstractly, and to take them as case studies which somehow all repeat the same pattern (are “we” like the Mayans? No, Mr. Gibson, sorry, it’s not that easy). “Civilizations” are always highly specific, and have different relation to wilderness as well, not always ridden by relentless profit-search.
For instance, the understanding of jungle within south Asia has been historically complex: it is a space to be colonized by peasants who are occasionally directed by the state powers, but there is also the notion of it being the seat of gods and a space of freedom, necessary rather than a luxury retreat, and people from outside the jungle historically have not always had the ability to impose their will on it and the jungle peoples. Many of the jungle peoples responded by raiding, and often the jungle took over villages.
Most of those spaces have been destroyed in the subcontinent within the last 150 years rather than the previous three millennia under the aegis of profit and development by technology. This is not to meant to wax poetically and to elevate Indians into the cliche of “peaceful Hindoos”, since any notion that they were otherworldly and saintly before, alas, the Muslim hordes invaded, is naive British colonial reverie. The example merely shows that capitalism, rather than any abstract concept of civilization, is our enemy.
Second point:
In the US, perhaps there is no other way of “salvation” than to strive to “own” a piece of land and grow one’s own food. There is still an element of pioneer spirit and libertarianism within this which I am wary of, but maybe it is the only way, culturally as well as practically, for the US-Americans to live within the reality after the crash and to survive it. However, it assumes you are not burdened by incredibly high student loan debt, which many from my generation will have to continue paying even if they become homeless. The previous generation mostly accumulated debt through mortgage, but some of them in the end do own their houses, whereas with college loans you may owe a hundred thousand dollars and not have any land or other property, and you have to continue paying for as long as credit card sharks exist, which may be another couple of decades, an entire lifetime. In other words, I do not think I will ever be able to save enough money to own anything, which rules out buying a little house with a little plot, and I will not inherit anything either.
Finally:
Moving back into the wilderness and really small-scaling it may work fine for north Americans, since there is still is a lot of space out there, but in more heavily urbanized areas such as western Europe, this is impossible. There is not enough land for everyone to own a plot, so something else will have to happen. Also, what about Egypt, for instance? There is only the Nile, there is no other place to go than along the exceedingly fertile, but slim
space along the water. Meaning: even if there is no oil, Cairo as a city will have to survive, and it cannot do so by movement into the wilderness. People will have to revert to animal power, which is relatively easy, but the city will remain as a space.
All this is to remind us to avoid easy abstractions, at the head of which is that tedious little tale about “western civilization”, worse, “European” civilization (this does not include the Albanians, or does it?).
As for the Dems: they are occasionally taking off the humanitarian mask, as Gore is doing now, and Mrs. Clinton as well, in her recent rant against the Iraqis. They must be nervous…it’s hard to go cold turkey after you’ve had some power in your hands…
22 February 2007, 12:57 pmDeAnander:
good comments all, though I would quarrel with Charles (what else is new) and say that our agriculture is NOT producing surpluses. it is producing net losses, at 10 calories of fossil energy per calorie of food; crop losses to pests are higher than ever; topsoil and aquifers are drawn down to perilous lows; and we are now in, what, the 7th year of dipping into world grain reserves to cover shortfalls? and now a vocal corps of lunatics is proposing to divert grain productio to feed wealthy people’s automobiles? no, what we are doing in agriculture is skating desperately ahead of our debts, with the interest mounting daily.
which is, after all, how capitalism works: by loan sharking and debt-kiting. so it makes sense that this model — future discounting, colossal debt accrual, liquidation — pervades all aspects of the cultures which practise the religion of capitalism…
capitalism is totalising in a way that previous regimes — imperial, theocratic, etc — only dreamed of being. whether this is solely because of the mesmerising power of its guiding mythology (infinite wealth creation, the transcendence of limits) or because of the enormous population spike that accompanied its rise (this is often claimed by capitalists as a success story, but if we remember that poor and desperate people tend to have larger families, one can read it rather differently) which in turn means that there are few places left to run away from capitalism (almost the entire inhabitable earth is, well, maximally inhabited)… well sorry, this sentence just got out of hand, but in any case I an agreeing with you that capitalism as an ideology or organising principle is unique in human history in its destructive force. it’s very like a virus.
I think Jensen’s aware of the limitations of lonewolf environmental anti-terrorism (let’s call things what they are: threatening to exterminate the entire salmon population of NW Am is a terrorist act, just as MTR is a terrorist act. eco-terrorists are those who destroy ecosystems, not those who try to preserve them)… in EG 2, iirc, he acknowledges the necessity for action on every level — remedial/healing, challenging power directly, working covertly, writing, teaching, working with kids, organising the neighbourhood, etc.
what makes him such a valuable writer — for me anyway — is that he makes the general concept of civilisational suicide (which one can derive from less charismatically readable authors like Hornborg, Illich, Mies, Jones, etc) accessible — emotionally vivid, meaningful, urgent and accessible to the average reader. and he has a goddamn clue about gender, which puts him on a pretty small shelf
Stan’s picking some of the same nits that I would, but I think Jensen has a demonstrated ability to reach some people who would never voluntarily make it through Hornborg or Mies… he’s kind of the J Grisham of the Civilisational Critique movement.
22 February 2007, 5:17 pmCharles:
Perhaps we are using “surplus” in different ways. If I read you correctly, you are referring to relative waste and inefficiency in production, such that it takes more energy to produce food than the energy humans get from the food. I’m referring to , say, 10 people producing enough food to feed 100, the surplus being all the food produced beyond the needs of the 10 direct producers. Today’s agriculture still produces surpluses in the sense that I use the word, even as it is inefficient/non-surplus in your sense.
By the way, capitalism is all about producing surplus value, and the “surplus” in that phrase is of the same type as the original surpluses, surplus products. To understand capitalism , must understand _surplus_ value and exploitation. On this issue, Marx ain’t out of date, nor is it “dogma” , but science, oops, “science” is “masculine”. Lets say wisdom/witchdom
22 February 2007, 5:59 pmCharles:
By the way, on the “conquest of nature” trope, another way of saying something similar is that “swivilization” started with the domestication of plants and animals. Appropriately, linguistically, the latter is termed animal HUSBANDRY ! We might speculate that the original husbanding of animals became the model for husbanding women, as slaves first. At any rate, this is substantially similar to the whole thesis of an idetity of origin and analogy between the “conquest” of nature and the “conquest” of women, although it may reverse the “order” from your thesis , I’m not sure; and of course it puts it way back in time.
Also, a key thing is that it is not clear that today’s “conquest of nature” trope is universtal or beyond the West, White Man’s Civ., capitalist culture. I don’t think indigenous African or American cultures had a “conquest of nature or women” ideology. Many Africans have MAAT, with a woman-man equality principle. Nor Chinese, as far as I know. But , of course, capitalism has _conquered_the globe, so White civilization’s tropes are the problem of the whole human race, today.
22 February 2007, 6:10 pmFire Witch:
“@firewitch I think there’s a significant difference between condemning farming per se — the whole realm of humans cultivating plants for food and fibre — and condemning specifically “agri-culture,†the cultivation of the ploughed field for (mostly) grain crops, which is the focus of increasing critique. we don’t have a strong consensus at the moment on the meaning of these words — much as we ludicrously say “conventionally grown†for crops grown by insane fossil-intensive and toxic methods introduced only in the last 50 years”
Understood.
What I mean to emphasize is that there are some in the back-to-the-land movement who have added a fetish of hunter-gatherism in order to now condemn indigenous people for being too agricultural rather than too primitive. These white folks have intentionally chosen to conflate permaculture with agriculture. Having then established that ANY interference with plant succession taints one a sinner worthy of condemnation, they then can by-pass the moral requirement to struggle in alliance with indigenous peoples in the restoration of their national sovereignty, freeing themselves up to own Indian land without guilt. Basically it boils down to a racist justification of white flight, i.e., we are more Indian than you now, so the land rightfully belongs to us.
New agers are particularly adept at this new twist on the same old imperialism - we whites know better what to do with the land than you.
“…several scholars have pointed out that the “sublime wilderness†of N America so much admired by the Anglo invaders, was not wilderness at all in many cases but permacultivation by the indigenous people, with plant life encouraged, guided and tended (the “food forest†concept) by human denizens…”
This is particularly encouraging to hear, if I am hearing you correctly that indigenous people grew old growth forests for food.
I also agree with your take that Jensen has called for multi-faceted approaches to the problem of civilization. He has indeed recommended both reformist actions and radical actions. The key, as he emphasizes, is knowing what is appropriate when - something I see this website and Insurgent American expressing particularly well.
Now. Here is what I am left pondering the probably impossible to answer: why did some peoples choose to become civilizations - with all their attendant violence - where many peoples did not.
But that might lead the conversion towards Immanuel Velikovsky and his theories of catatstrophic comet encounters and their trauma-inducing responses in human societies. A bit much perhaps for one topic thread.
Oh, one more thing to say about food production and patriarchy. I have heard it said that below a certain body-fat threshold, a woman will not menstruate. This is not to say that we are starving when at this level, but that we do not have that little extra needed to support fertility. If this is so, then an over-abundance of starches (corn, rice, wheat, etc) produced via farming could result in over-population, as these starches tend to increase the potential for fertility.
If this is truly so, then women’s fertility is intimately tied to the earth’s fertility. If the earth is forced to overproduce, then women will overproduce. My point here is that if there is a direct relationship between women’s fertility and the earth’s fertility, then women should have the first say in how much food is produced. In traditional indigenous societies, I believe this was usually the case. Therefore, patriarchy at base is that process that steals this sovereignty from women for its own ends, especially as men are not directly affected by the sometimes life-and-death consequences that pregnancy can bring.
What I ponder often is this: if the violence that civilization is is a trauma response, where did that trauma come from? Why would a people just suddenly up and colonize themselves? Why would men turn on women?
Did a catastrophic earth event or series of events start all this? Or did it happen slowly over time?
Blast! The origins of Original Sin still elude me.
22 February 2007, 8:25 pmderrick Jensen:
This is in response to Mark Smith.
Thank you for your kind comments about my work.
However, you wrote:
It’s very easy, as Jensen does, to say that there is a difference between reform and revolution, and that all reform is a mere palliative. It’s also wrong.
***
This is not an accurate criticism of my work. I say again and again and again in that book and others that the reform versus revolution dichotomy is harmful and wrong. We need it all. If we all wait for the great glorious revolution, there’ll be nothing left to save. If we only do reform work, the world will be ground to nothing.
I really GOT that when I was teaching at Pelican Bay, a supermax. I recognized that I was participating in the biggest racist gulag on the planet, and at the same time many of my students said that my classes were the only things keeping them sane.
We need reform. We need revolution. I say that again and again. Please don’t imply that I am not inclusive of tactics. I am the most inclusive person I know regarding what is necessary, everything from filing timber sale appeals to filing lawsuits to counterviolence to sending pink bubbles of love. Much of my point is that the tactics need to fit the situation. Sometimes reform is appropriate. Sometimes fighting back is appropriate. Sometimes running away is appropriate. Sometimes education is appropriate. Sometimes it’s appropriate to wait.
Derrick
23 February 2007, 4:22 amderrick Jensen:
oops. Maybe it was Stan who said that.
Well, whomever said it, I am inclusive of tactics.
And in any case, Stan, thank you for your extremely important work. I’ve been reading and admiring your work for years.
Thank you,
Derrick
23 February 2007, 4:23 amify:
What are movies, constructed scarecrows right. CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS SAY THAT FEMINISM IS A CONSTRUCTED SCARECROW TOO. So maybe you can help me understand what a scarecrow is so I have a way to answer people who say that being pissed about preying on women to rape sexual abuse, and kidnap is a figment of my imagination and a “constructed scarecrow”.
23 February 2007, 11:56 amTellurian:
A long time ago, uner anothr nmme and I believe to a counterpunch article, I sent you the notion that power-states were based on institutionalized theft, murder and deceit. Actually I like your version much better. I would use ‘power-states’ rather than ‘civilization’ and distinguish them from the power structure that controls them, and the population, nearly 90% of the people, ruled by them. aside from that, what you state is the simple truth.
The Huffington comments seem to be mostly by liberals. Nothing to be done, I suppose.
I reread parts of your FULL SPECTRUM DISORDER. Your style has become more penetrating and explosive, but the origins of the originality is there. It will be appreciated more after you’re dead, a very long time from now. I’m sure that is an enormous consolation.
23 February 2007, 4:11 pmCharles:
Fire Witch asks some questions of the all times. I sometimes speculate the answers, so speculating, maybe the “domestication” of animals, control of them, training them, involved use of force. Eventually, somebody decided to transfer the same thing to people.
As to origin of agriculture, speculation might be that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Some groups decided to start storing surpluses for hard times. Agriculture is a method for producing surplus amounts of food to get through hardtimes, times when just living off of the old hunting , gathering , foraging mode of production are failing for some reason. Enter the food production revolution.
Surplus is defined as production of more than the needs of the direct producers.
Once there is production of surpluses, a class can arise of non-producers who live off the surplus production of others - priests, overseers, predominantly mental laborers; and then the antagonism between the two classes… and we’re off with swivalization… origin of “sin”, fall from the garden of eden ( and there was a gardening mode , the Neolithic, right in the period before the origin of agriculture.)
Archaeological evidence has agriculture originating in the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile and Mexico, Peru, and China.
23 February 2007, 5:18 pmBob H:
A couple of points that readers might find interesting:
On the question of permaculure, this book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus seems to be a summary of many varieties of large-scale permaculture and “environmental engineering” in the Americas that archeologists are starting to discover. I haven’t read it, but saw the author lecture on C-SPAN, and it sounds like there’s a lot we can learn from this history.
On cities and civilization, Scientific American had an article some time back about excavations at Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. This was a continuously occupied neolithic ‘city’, which existed for over a thousand years with no signs of war (no walls, no massive fires). It appears to have been populated before the division of labor. more about it here. Among other things, this seems like a good refutation that humankind is naturally warlike.
I’ve also read that according to some studies of global climate history, agriculture only became possible about 10,000 years ago, because before that climate was much more variable, making long-term stable settlements impractical. There are some worries that global warming is brining us back to this situation away from the ‘window of civilization’, the abnormal climate stability of the few millenia.
On an astronomical note, it’s only a matter of time before an asteroid or comet large enough to wipe out human life (and possibly all invertebrate life) off the face of the earth. That is, our long-term survival as a species depends on developing the kind of technology that allows replicating all the necessities of life from the most basic raw materials. I bring this up because it seems to me that any kind of long-term sustainable society has to address this, but that many people who advocate a sane, sustainable society seem basically opposed to the development of the technology that would make this possible. Not trying to troll here, just to suggest that technological change really can be part of human ‘progress’ if it’s guided by wisdom.
24 February 2007, 1:09 pmLegume Sam:
btw, Conceptual Guerilla has headlined you over at DailyKos…
24 February 2007, 3:25 pmStan:
Just back from a short trip, and I’m covered up in catch-up stuff.
I want to express my delight that Derrick Jensen is hereabouts, invite him to contribute primary material any time, and that goes for Insurgent American too.
I haven’t finished reading the book yet, so if my critique was premature or off the mark, I stand gladly corrected and offer an unqualified apology if I have misrepresented you, Derrick. I don’t like that when others do it to me; and I’m just as prone to screw up as the next person.
I want to reiterate here that I believe Endgame is canonical in its content, and that the writing there has ignited the envy of both writer-moderators here.
25 February 2007, 9:59 amRhisiart Gwilym:
Siwmae pawb (Hiya all)!
Anyone interested in the idea that the Amazon Basin may be largely edible forest carefully encouraged and nurtured for a very long time by quite a large pre-colombian Amerindian population might like to google up ‘terra preta’ and surf. This discovery has just started to register more widely in recent years. With the indulgence of Stan and the posters, may I copy here a current comment I’m posting to the Terra Preta discussion list (terrapreta@bioenergylists.org)? I think it’s pertinent to Stan’s discussions, for various reasons, but I won’t detail them here. I guess you’ll see what I mean.
QUOTE:
I’m working on a permaculture garden on a friend’s mountainside tyddyn (smallholding) in Gwynedd, Cymru Gogledd, Britain. I stumbled on the terra preta/charcoal emendation/ carbon-resequestration ideas just recently, and I have a question and a suggestion:—–
1) The question, to Richard, Peter and Janice, and to anyone else with the necessary hands-on experience already, goes like this:
Years back, I was a member of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now known as ‘Garden Organic’, at Ryton Gardens, Ryton on Dunsmore, near Coventry, Britain) when it was a camaraderie of backyard gardeners, small-holders, and so on, who did organised experimental gardening, to gather knowledge of practical small-scale ways to enhance yield, land-health and people-health. This knowledge was intended for free distribution to anyone, particularly poor subsistence agriculturalists in the poor countries, as the original HDRA was an educational charity.
One member had considerable success at growing his food plants not in bare soil, nor in heavily mulched ground, but in a permanent sward (lawn). The constituent plants of this sward were mainly our local couch grass - conventionally thought of as the gardeners’ enemy, because it’s supposed to overwhelm the growth of any useful food plant), plus any other volunteer plants which could stand the repeated clipping of this method, plus - in particular - a generous percentage of white clover plants, which would be re-sown from time to time with new seed, as over time the couch grass would begin to overhaul the clover in total ground cover.
Food plants can be started in trays and transplanted, or seeded directly into the sward. In either case, a plug of turf is cut from the sward, filled loosely with compost until it stands a little above the level of the sward, and the seedling/seed is set in. I’m also just getting going with Fukuoka seed-balls too, both for the garden and for the remediation-by-stealth of the huge, still-bare spoil stacks of the abandoned slate quarries on the mountainsides near here.
The sward is clipped several times through the growing season, as often as local conditions make necessary, to keep it short around the food plants. Naturally, the food plants are not clipped. My colleague had devised two or three specially adapted hand tools to enable this regime - scissor-action clippers with extended, balance-weighted handles, and a six-inch wide hand-pushed lawn mower, for example - which did the job quickly and easily. In practise, during our Summer season, he reckoned he clipped once every ten days to two weeks, and that for his whole ground, he needed only a couple of hours work to leave the whole sward short, with only the food plants upright in it. He reckoned that this was a low-labour garden, as good as no-dig methods, and far less work than the regular tending of bare-soil methods. It seems also to be an excellent conserver of water and nutrients.
His other innovation was to collect worm-casts and mix them with water to a thin slurry, and water this onto the ground immediately around each food plant, as a spot-fed super plant food. However, the main feeding of the soil comes from the release of bacterially-fixed nitrates from the clover root-nodules after each clip (the roots seem to die back a corresponding amount to the above-ground foliage that’s clipped down), and from repeated thin broadcastings of compost material, manure, seaweed, and so on, directly onto the sward surface, for the local - big! - population of resident worms to pull down and eat. All sward clippings too are simply left lying, for the same processing. Incidentally, scattering plant food in this way means that there’s no need to do much prior preparation, such as composting. Just thin broadcasting of the raw material is fine. The composting process is taken care of below the surface, by the soil community. Fukuoka reports a similar technique of broadcasting raw, unprocessed materials included, for example, poultry manure, which is usually supposed to ‘burn’ plants with its high N content unless previously rotted.
As you can imagine, this method leaves the soil undisturbed for years, and allows the evolution of a climax soil community of great richness. Soil aeration and drainage is left to the worms, moles and other natural agents.
Now, being persuaded that there’s something very powerful going on in terra preta soils, even if Western enquirers are not yet too sure what, I’m proposing to begin adding charcoal powder to my sward. (I’m really keen too to do anything that any ordinary obscure joe can do to begin pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. I’ve been grieving about the dreadful effects of GW since long before it became a mainstream concern.) My idea is simply to broadcast char dust directly onto the surface of the sward, a thin dressing at a time, rake the sward plants lightly, and leave it to migrate down into the body of the soil by natural action. (Everything seems to sink slowly down into undisturbed soils in this way, over time) I have homemade versions of the rocket stoves developed by Larry Winiarski and Ianto Evans, which I use for cooking and heating, and which can be run so as to generate useful quantities of residual charcoal from whatever you feed into them, and at a range of temperatures and - well - ‘cookedness’, according to the air-flow through the stove. The tyddyn is surrounded by permanent mountainside oak forest, so there’s no shortage of easily forageable wood. (Information and images of my friend Eric’s tyddyn can be seen at http://www.caemabon.co.uk. No pictures of the garden posted yet, though.)
I want to ask if anyone has practical experience which would enhance this plan, or avoid pitfalls which I may have overlooked. I don’t want to dig up the sward, obviously, as I don’t want to disrupt the accumulated benefits of the permanent cover. Besides, these days hand digging seems to me to be a conflation of slave labour - for me - and mass murder of my small kindred in the soil. I particularly hate cutting up worms. As well as thinly scattering charcoal dust on the surface, I could dose the bottom of each plug hole with dust at a deeper level, with compost on top, or maybe mix dust into the compost. The siting of planting plugs moves from season to season, so that would lead eventually to a ground with a layer of top-dressed powder left to migrate into the soil by the effects of the soil-turning agents, plus quite thickly scattered doses of dust in pockets at slightly deeper levels.
So, I want to ask: Any comments drawn from previous experience, please?
2) From the brief sketch of the HDRA given above, do list members think that a similar network might be useful to gather knowledge about charcoal amendments to soils to produce terra preta? Lawrence Hills, who started the HDRA, was passionate about the multitude of useful functions of Comfrey, and slanted the association particularly towards that research. A great resource of useful information and practical methods were archived as a result. Considering the twin vital benefits that are promised here - greatly increased food production with long-persisting soil enhancement, plus substantial re-sequestration of atmospheric carbon - the same kind of widespread backyard network could have a crucial role in dealing with our current interlinked global crises. What’s more, this is something that could be disseminated widely to millions of small-scale farmers and gardeners everywhere, with carbon sequestration massively promoted as a necessary by-product of better food-growing: Something that any obscure average grower anywhere in the world could do, with a very strong personal incentive, without having to wait for the dinosaurs of big biz, big gov, and the sacred, holy ‘Free’ Market (free? oh really?) to get their lumbering acts together.
It was a fact, though, that Lawrence himself worked all the time at making the association effective. It seems to need one person, at least, to be wholly committed to it. He was a lifelong full-time professional horticulturalist who never stopped thinking about his craft, hence the HDRA.
END QUOTE.
Cofion gorau i bawb (Best remembrances to all), Rhisiart Gwilym
25 February 2007, 4:03 pmxenia:
Today, while reading my favorite liberal-wanna-be-left German newspaper,I came across an insightful article on US-American landscape painting and the Hudson River School which resonates with our discussion here.
To distance themselves from European painters and to display their patriotism, the painters drew the wilderness with a token Indian. The wilderness, however, was portrayed from a safe distance, in soft colors and quite tamed. Occasionally, as in the work by Albrecht Bierstadt, landscapes from the Swiss Alps were transferred from Europe into California. Sometimes religious symbols were employed as well, alluding to the garden of Eden.
The most fascinating aspect is that the school took off in the decade after the Trail of Tears and other Jacksonian genocidal adventures because of which the South barely has any indigenous population. After the “savages” made way for civilization (ie cotton plantations) wild nature could be celebrated instead of feared.
The efforts of some sections of the Cherokees to become civilized by having newspapers, constitution and owning slaves were in vain, and they still had to make way, because they were unclean per definition. This reminds me of some so-called middle classes in the Arab world (and elsewhere)…as much as they try to prove that they are equal to their masters by speaking English only with their kids, driving SUVs and having regular plastic surgery sessions, they come out as brainwashed buffoons.
25 February 2007, 5:04 pmJames M:
To expand on Xenia’s comment, here’s a quote from Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane”:
Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying territory already inhabited by “other” human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony … everything that is not “our world” is not yet a world. A territory can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it.
These paintings sound to me like a secularized form of “ritual taking possession” … and the religious symbols and Garden of Eden allusions make sense in terms of “repeating the cosmogony.”
25 February 2007, 8:33 pmCharles:
On cities and civilization, Scientific American had an article some time back about excavations at Çatalhöyük, in Turkey. This was a continuously occupied neolithic ‘city’, which existed for over a thousand years with no signs of war (no walls, no massive fires). It appears to have been populated before the division of labor. more about it here. Among other things, this seems like a good refutation that humankind is naturally warlike.
^^^^^^
Right on ! Peace in , forever !
26 February 2007, 5:10 pmCharles:
Civilization & War Rant
^^^^^
27 February 2007, 12:38 pmI got my son to read this to me on the way to school today.
Charles:
from Engels’ Origins of the Family:
>With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things
of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it
achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions
in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities.
From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of
civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth,
not of society, but of the single scurvy individual - here was its
one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of
science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap,
it was only because without them modern wealth could not have
completely realized its achievements.
Since civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by
6 March 2007, 4:31 pmanother class, its whole development proceeds in a constant
contradiction. Every step forward in production is at the same time a
step backwards in the position of the oppressed class, that is, of
the great majority. Whatever benefits some necessarily injures the
others; every fresh emancipation of one class is necessarily a new
oppression for another class. The most striking proof of this is
provided by the introduction of machinery, the effects of which are
now known to the whole world. And if among the barbarians, as we saw,
the distinction between rights and duties could hardly be drawn,
civilization makes the difference and antagonism between them clear
even to the dullest intelligence by giving one class practically all
the rights and the other class practically all the duties.
Legume Sam:
Where is it quoted that Al Gore said Bush I should have finished the job? I’d like to quote it myself…
10 March 2007, 11:52 pmStan:
Hope this goes through. Some kind of comment section glitch keeps zapping my text away.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/809168.stm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Al_Gore.htm
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j092502.html
The actual Gore quote, from a debate with Bush II:
Here is from CP, in which Gore is coming out almost two years in advance of the administration in support of Chalabi’s clique (not surprising, because Chalabi was the invention of a PR firm that worked both sides of the aisle):
12 March 2007, 7:33 amRandy Morris:
Just finished Jensen’s Endgame.
Two word review: READ IT!
Derrick, you’ve written a catalyst for me at least—thanks.
Now to work…finally.
Randy
30 March 2007, 6:04 pmzezt:
I have only just found here. And I love this place. I have been reading the articles and the comments, and I feel intelligence, great insight, creative and free exploration, and love here. So I thought I would join in
Hmmmmm, something I am confused about. Wonder if anyone can explore this with me. I recently read an article by Zerzan, and he mentions the Garden of Eden myth. For some reason, this myth, its drama and imagery, and the fact it is ‘our creation myth’ captured my imagination as a kid, and this was emphasized radically after I found J.M.Allegro’s book, the STILL extremely controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. It was that book which turned me on to looking closer at mythology and how it relates to us
Now Allegro was a philologist, and explored the root meanings of the text and symbols and metaphors of that story, and we find that the ‘Tree’ (which includes the ‘two trees’. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life) as actually cryptically referring to one tree, the World Tree. Which as you know is a central motif of the more anceint shamanism.
So, the Tree Allegro reveals is referring to a sacred mushoom. And as he and othes have shown, the imagery, the Tree, Serpent, Woman, Lover (Adam) are also part of the more anceint Goddess religion, with the ‘God’ of the story, looking after ‘his’ garden, as a bit of an upstart!
Now, as Zerzan says, this god curses Adam, and Eve and expells them from Paradise, and Zerzam claims this is first recorded document revealing mankind’s enforced subservience to agriculture.
So question: How come this Genesis myth is showing this if, as a patriarchal propaganda device it itself is the cause OF such a ‘fall’? What do you think is going on here?
14 December 2007, 8:50 amRandy Morris:
Welcome Zezt!
Randy
14 December 2007, 10:56 am