Falsehoods and ambiguities

There are several easy critiques that Jensen leaves himself open to in the course of his writings. While I don't suggest that these are really problematic to his overall argument, I've come across them and want to point them out for the sake of completeness.

Jensen, in his nature-loving bias, occasionally misunderstands basic scientific understandings of the world. For instance, his concept of evolution is particularly flawed:

Endgame, p. 36: “Another way to put this is that any group of beings (human or nonhuman, plant or anmial) who take more from their surroundings than they give back will, obviously, deplete their surroundings, after which they will either have to move, or their population will crash (which, by the way, is a one sentence disproof of the notion that competition drives natural selection: if you hyper-exploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take. Duh).”

The problem with this is that, even if cooperation and giving back to your environment is the thing that allows you to survive in the long run, it's still competition that's selecting for the individuals who do that the best. Jensen seems to have conflated the social-striving, rat-race connotations of the word 'competition' with the ecological one, which is nearly tautological - those individuals that survive best, for whatever reasons are most relevant to their situation, are the best competitors and therefore the fittest, the survivors.

Specific claims regarding indigenous peoples are misleading or entirely false.

Endgame: “Civilized wars are parodies of indigenous warfare, which is a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play, meaning civilized warfare is a parody of play.”

While there may be instances of non-lethal, formalized warfare, it is also true that bitter, bloody warfare in some form is common at nearly all levels of social integration. The Mantaro highlanders of Peru built fortified towns and fought to take and keep good land (Earle, 1997). Chiefdoms in Bronze Age Thy, Denmark warred for prestige and livestock (Earle, 1997). Hawaiian kingdoms fought over good irrigable land (Earle, 1997). The Yanomamo are famously warlike, often destroying whole communities, gang-raping captured women, and, again, taking land (Earle and Johnson, 1987). The Central Enga of Highland New Guinea engage in “frequent and vicious warfare,” (Earle and Johnson, 1987). While these societies are all more integrated than the family level society, few of them meet Jensen's definition of civilized: they do not depend on imported resources (Jensen, 2006).

Derrick Jensen and more pronouncedly David Abram often suggest that indigenous communities, who spend so much of their cultural and intellectual life paying attention to their landbases, are much less likely to do things that will hurt those landbases; they are "sane and intelligent" inhabitants of the land. The stark contrasts between Alberta’s tar sands and literally any indigenous homeland make this a plausible argument. However, the situation is once again vastly more complicated than Jensen’s presentation lets on. While it's certainly true that native cultures understood/understand their environments intimately, there are plenty of counterexamples in which non-civilized groups have drastically altered their environments in ways they would likely not have done by choice. For instance, the Enga of New Guinea have “greatly diminished the former diversity of plants and animals” in their valleys, and created a situation of circumscribed resources and lowered dietary quality (Earle and Johnson 1987).

Native Americans did respect and understand their relationship with animals like deer and beavers, but were influenced by the attractive offers made by European traders. The autonomous decision made by Native groups to trade possibly over-harvested native plants and animals in exchange for trade goods of real value to them should not be slighted. While disease, imperialism, and alcohol were exogenous negative influences on native land ethics, they do not mean that native communities couldn't and didn't make decisions that hurt their landbases - the introduction of Europeans did not remove all agency from Native communities. One might also ask: what good is a strict conservation policy and culture if it cannot withstand a rigorous test like this.

This does not mean that indigenous peoples are “just as bad” as Exxon-Mobil, nor does it justify their exploitation. Had he been more honest, Jensen could have presented these ambiguities and outliers without harm to his argument. After all, indigenous communities don’t need to be perfect, and they don’t need to be uniformly sustainable, to provide many great examples of sustainable ways of living. As Jared Diamond pointed out, “[m]anaging environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult,” (Diamond, 2005) – and it’s neither fair nor realistic to hold indigenous peoples to a standard of land use for purely rhetorical purposes.

Premising his argument on the ecological wisdom of natives hurts Jensen's argument - it doesn't matter if all native peoples behaved the way he's advocating we act - just having some examples gives us the proof that it's possible and provides the light to guide us; making such blanket statements makes his argument superficially vulnerable to being undermined by counterexamples, even though his core argument remains valid.
Further, the usage histories of the terms civilized and indigenous are full of exploitative, misrepresentative, and out-right malicious arguments. As scholars, we can’t allow the backlash against such things to remove from consideration superficially similar intellectually responsible arguments. Any attempt to use facts about indigenous cultures and lifestyles to prove what is essentially a political argument must be held to a very high standard. Such arguments must be replete with carefully qualified statements and specific ethnographic citations. In this sense, Jensen’s argument fails even when its claims are true.

"Other Plans"

While Derrick, Aric, and Lierre are the activist authors nearest and dearest to my heart, they are by no means the only point of view on the issues they discuss.  In "Other Plans," Lierre addresses many of the writers she perceives as her counterparts, many of them identified with the "Peak Oil Community."  Our tutorial read a number of these authors - Ted Trainer, Lester Brown, John Michael Greer, Pat Murphy, etc.  I was unprepared for the degree of repetition among these authors.  They all seemed to be saying the same things: industrial civilization isn't that great (due to inequality, materialism, violence, etc) and it's also about to collapse (due to peak oil) and we should do something about that.

What we should do, in a mixture of preparation for post-collapse life and in order to prevent/soften the collapse, is prepare self-sufficient local food systems, sustainable local energy systems, local economies, control population growth, reduce inequality, spread democracy, etc.  The authors differ primarily in their emphases and predilections: Brown favors policy solutions, since he's a policy adviser, while Trainer, Murphy and Jensen see government as part of the problem.  Brown favors technological solutions like solar panels, while Jensen sees these as perpetuating the industrial system causing the problem.  Brown favors market mechanisms, while Jensen and Trainer are firmly anti-capitalist.

While there are subtle differences in approach, none of these really matter: no author can control what activists do with the degree of specificity that would be required to prevent both high-tech and low-tech solutions from being implemented.  The diverse group of activists has their own predilections and essentially everything will happen whether the authors like it or not.  DGR is the exception to this: they are the only people pushing for violent direct action against the industrial system.  It seems quite likely that their advocacy will have a strong effect on whether this kind of activism is carried out. 


However, without evidence-based future projections, these authors differ more in the ideological predispositions or their readers (as well as their relative pessimism) than in their factually falsifiable hypotheses and arguments.  While it could be a matter of academic debate whether or not we should engage in monkey-wrenching (though it's a complex question), the arguments, e.g. Lierre makes are more about ideology than about reality: if you believe capitalism is bunk, then her argument pleases you; if not, she never presents any evidence to sway you to her side.  This is perhaps because she sees this debate as too large and complex to adequately address here, as well as too polarized and overdone to be worth rehashing.  But this illustrates the problem in premising her argument on anti-capitalism: activists don't and won't agree on this question, and it is not as crucial to Lierre's point as she seems to think it is (presumably because anti-capitalism is both very important to her personally and because it was a key influence in bringing her to the position she advocates in DGR).

McBay seems to understand this when he points out that "even if you want humans to be able to use factories to build windmills and use tractors to help grow food over the next fifty years, forcing an immediate cut in fossil fuel consumption should be at the top of your to-do list."  He is pointing out that it's not necessary for someone to accept his narrative in order to agree on the task at hand.  That's not to say he doesn't fall into the same fallacy just as much as Lierre, however - he just seems to see past it for a moment of clarity here.

Thus, DGR's analysis does little to establish why it is more relevant and correct than any of its peers.  Lierre attempts to do this in "Other Plans," but her critiques are often superficial and appeal to the emotional and ideological predilections of her readers rather than presenting some compelling facts.  I happen to agree with her, but for that reason I think that her position needs to be defended and advocated with some better evidence, in order to distinguish it from competitors and defend the legitimacy of her plan in a more mainstream community.  The evidence may not exist or may not have been organized and interpreted yet, but it seems clear that this must happen before DGR becomes something more than a fringe group motivated by eclectic emotional and ideological backgrounds.

Edit 5/24/2013:  I've recently come across articles about psychological studies on worldview and ideology. It seems to be the case that, through whatever means, people have personalities and worldviews (like, deep worldviews) that differ fundamentally and make them predisposed to certain interpretations over others, and to certain responses over others. That is, you could say that there is a "moderate brain" and a "radical brain," (as Chris Mooney dichotomizes in his article on the Keystone XL fight - he poses Bill McKibben as his "radical" which is kind of funny here, where McKibben is juxtaposed against DGR's militancy) or even a "conspiracy theorist brain."  The research shows only the faintest suggestions about what might make a person have one of these brain types, but once they have them, it's tough to get out. If the research is correct, then DGR readers like DGR because it tells them a narrative congruent with their worldview. The contrast between DGR and its competitors in the apocalypse activism arena is simply a matter of this, the predilection of their readers. While there is some sort of "objective" difference between the arguments, the intellect is not the force driving readers from one to the other.

There is a very well-defined narrative here, and I literally have read dozens of books that make my brain light up in the reading of it. It may hold lots of elements of truth - and indeed, a major part of what I like about the narrative is that it must be presented with copious peer reviewed evidence, to "prove" the story is correct and make me feel intelligent for following.

Narratives

In the process of investigating Derrick Jensen's intellectual forebears, our tutorial read a few classic anarchist texts from the turn of the century - Voltairine de Cleyre's "Direct Action" and Petr Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread." These works are of course spiritually and often literally in line with Derrick's analysis and his feelings - though they just as often seem anachronistic and irrelevant. However, the most striking relationship between the two was their reliance on narrative. They seemed to agree that no activist plan could be established without a clear schematic idea of what caused the relevant problems. The analyses provided, especially that of Kropotkin, offer a sort of cautionary tale about relying on such narratives, since they are based on anachronistic ideas about progress, history, class relationships, among other things. They gave a narrative of the history of the world in simple, moralistic terms. Technical progress and hard work developed raw materials into riches but the greedy powerful people monopolized the riches and stole what rightfully belongs to all. They move on to a solution that seems obvious and easy in the light of their narrative: take the stuff back from the rich. The narratives ignore the vast complexity of the world and impose an artificial simplicity that precludes practical work.

In DGR, Lierre critiques millenarian cultists who believe "the end is near." But is DGR not just another one of those groups, believing, without substantial scientific evidence, that civilization will collapse within a century or two? Jensen's analysis lines up uncannily with the archetypal story of Christianity, as John Michael Greer points out in "The Long Descent." To illustrate: before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, through the hubris of greedy men, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.

Of course, Jensen's claims and the things he advocates don't become false simply by fitting the criteria Greer lays out. However, Jensen's overly simplistic historical narrative and understanding of anthropology reveal at least that part of his narrative is flawed, which calls into question the other claims he makes. What consequences does the narrative have for Jensen's factuality?

In general, there is a substantial amount of ambiguity about collapse in DGR writings. It is never specified just what politic system is going to collapse and how, and there are many possible paths provided that apparently all lead to the same end. While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse. In our tutorial, we imagined an "Intergovernmental Panel on Global Collapse," to parallel the IPCC in collecting and interpreting data about the possible routes to collapse and which systems were most vulnerable, as well as how we might go about preventing and/or guiding and encouraging such processes.

The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.

Greer's alternative to Jensen's simplistic narrative is, if nothing else, a bit more humble. He doesn't claim that we as activists can change the course of civilization - he believes it is collapsing, and will do so over hundreds of years in a complex way as fossil fuels gradually run out. He sees it is a predicament we need to deal with, like death, rather than a problem we are capable of solving - in any direction. This makes sense, since the whole process is big and complex and we are small and don't understand very much - the IPGC does not exist, after all. His alternative is appealing in its calm demeanor - yes, everything's going hell in handbasket and we're killing the planet &tc, but there's no reason to freak out about it because there's nothing we can do about it. This is true for many of the same reasons Jensen and co. so often bring up to discredit the exclusive use of traditional routes of activism. To Greer, they just fail to mention that their model won't work either, for a variety of reasons - no one will actually do it, it would be too little too late, and the system is too large, complex, and full of inertia to be swayed by such a program.

While Greer's analysis has appealing aspects, Jensen's of course does as well, and the point I'm trying to make is that, without more specific information, we can't know which makes more sense - they are really more appeals to variations in personality and ideology. This is a problem throughout writing on collapse, as I'll detail in a later post.

Collapse?

The first volume of Jensen's magnum opus, Endgame, is dedicated primarily to documenting, metaphorically characterizing, and linking the manifold ills of civilization.  Civilization is so bad, we are told, that Jensen wishes it gone at nearly any cost.  Yet even he acknowledges that it would be infinitely preferable if the process of decivilizing were slow, occurring over generations, without abrupt disruptions in food supply, healthcare, education, etc.  A philosophy so driven by love of life as Jensen's does not easily condone what may amount to the (relatively) swift and gruesome deaths of potentially millions of people if not billions as civilization collapses and famine and disease become prevalent.

Jensen presents compelling arguments that show that this question is a red herring - that this is not the choice we face.  He asserts that "Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living." This is more or less obvious depending on what you think that transformation must look like, but it is clear that the rising prominence of "green" values is somewhat superficial and is certainly not yet on track to bring down civilization. The UN can't even agree on a decent framework to combat climate change, despite the massive purely financial intelligence of a mitigation strategy.  

Jensen goes further, to assert that a collapse of some sort is inevitable given expanding destruction and pollution coupled with growing affluence and population on a finite earth. This proposition is intuitive and widely accepted in some form, including by thinkers as seemingly mainstream as Lester Brown. It is defended very well by Huesemann and Huesemann here, who further point out that collapse is only avoidable through a reversal or stabilization of both affluence and population, and a contemporaneous increase in technological efficiency. This is essentially the "voluntary transformation" Jensen refers to above, and again, it seems increasingly unlikely. Again, Jensen seems to be well within at least one portion of the mainstream environmental movement with this prediction, hearkening back to such mainstays as the Club of Rome.

Integrating these two assumptions, Jensen reaches the reasonable conclusion that "the longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after." Thus, the best thing we could do for everyone who will be negatively impacted by collapse is the same thing as the best thing we could do for everyone presently negatively impacted by civilization. Accelerating collapse is a win-win! While I don't mean to imply that this is some intentional rhetorical ploy, it is clear that thus clearing the moral hurdle of collapse's consequences makes it far, far easier for readers to buy into Deep Green Resistance. It certainly made the idea much more ethically palatable to me, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that respect. Without the "stick" of impending doom, anti-civilization activism would attract a far smaller audience than it has. It has bitter carrots.  

While I agree with Jensen insofar as accelerating ecological destruction must have drastic consequences for civilization, and insofar as no political path is likely to avert them, in my investigation, I came to have some qualms with the narrative DGR presents. These are focused on the historical precedents and anthropological basis for arguments about collapse, and about the substantial uncertainties and lurking apocalypse-style thinking that haunt them.

I'll begin with the anthropological and historical questions. I mentioned in my "Civilization?" post that Jensen's failure to consider the origins and causes of civilization is an unfortunate oversight with negative consequences for his analysis of the present situation.  In designing a plan to accelerate and shape collapse, the first step must necessarily be to understand collapse – what it is, how it has worked in the past, and how it might happen in the future. And as Joseph Tainter puts it, “[c]ollapse may not be understood except in the context of how complex societies function and operate, and that cannot be divorced from the question of how they have come into being.” (Tainter, 1998) Since Jensen et al. fail to adequately address how civilization emerged in the first place, their ideas about its collapse are sometimes strange and misguided. They seem to believe that the implicit and explicit dominating force wielded by those in power is the only reason people don’t rise up and create a just society. That is, they ignore the functioning social contract that is civilization, the reciprocal relationship in which, no matter how bad a deal it is, those who work and pay taxes to support civilization do so because they still perceive this as a better deal than failing to do so – their alternative still seems worse.

However, in this case, the flaw may be purely intellectual. When discussing specific narratives of collapse and making his plans, McBay cites Tainter’s "The Collapse of Complex Societies" and uses its insights to frame the tasks of a Deep Green Resistance. Tainter’s thesis is that collapse represents an often-rapid change in the cost-benefit ratio of civilization (caused by diminishing marginal returns on complexity), particularly as experienced by those who support civilization in their day to day lives. McBay translates this into a simple recipe for DGR: “part of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the costs and decrease the benefits of empire-scale complexity. . . . aboveground activists facilitate . . . collapse by developing alternatives that will ease the pressure and encourage people to leave industrial capitalism by choice.”

If Tainter’s analysis is correct, then this is a positive case in which DGR writers used the anthropological literature to hone their strategy. On the other hand, Tainter’s thesis is not well tested (it is difficult to find case studies with sufficient data to track marginal returns over time) nor is it uncontested. The historical record of collapse is fraught with complications that seem to increase at every turn (see, for instance, the befuddlement surrounding Chaco Canyon and new evidence emerging at Easter Island that challenges the neat and tidy deforestation story told by Jared Diamond). There is certainly no case analogous to the plan of Deep Green Resistance, in which a group of individuals within a society deliberately sets out to accelerate its collapse. Thus, there is not necessarily any reason to think that it will be possible for activists to affect the cost-benefit balance of civilization. That, however, is probably not of itself a sufficient reason that we shouldn’t try.

I've read several good arguments that left me convinced that Aric's assertion that "the history of civilizations is defined by collapse . . . collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization."  In "Topsoil and Civilization," Vernon Gill Carter asserts that only the alluvially-recharged soils of the major floodplain civilizations have managed to stave off death by soil erosion for more than a thousand years.  David Montgomery's "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" is an excellent modern update of that story.  John Perlin's "A Forest Journey" tracks erosion's partner-in-crime, deforestation, through the rise and fall of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Europe.  Diamond's "Collapse" is an incomparable grand survey of historical collapses.  

All these sources use historical and archaeological evidence to make their point.  However, it's clear that anthropologists are not undivided on these issues, and it's possible that the authors here are overemphasizing the ecological component of collapse and decline, to the exclusion of important alternative factors, and more importantly to the exclusion of exceptions that might disprove the rule.

Insofar as collapse is the inverse of increasing complexity, it has as many explanations and shows as much local, case-by-case variation as that process (documented in Earle and Johnson's The Evolution of Human Societies).  Thus while collapse always occurs in the context of environmental conditions, and these conditions often add to the hardship causing collapse even when environmental degradation is not the primary cause, it is not the only explanation for historical collapses and declines. 

Much of this discussion is a question of definitions: anthropologists recoil at McBay's use of the term collapse for such a wide array of very different social changes that are not always negative (a qualification McBay would of course not hesitate to agree with, and vociferously at that).  For instance, new evidence reinterprets the collapses of the Mayan and Angkor Wat civilizations as bureaucracies that had outlived their usefulness, and which were abandoned without substantial demographic suffering.  Anthropologists point out that collapse is easy to find at the scale of individual cities, but is much more ambiguous when applied to larger cultural groups and political systems.  This is perhaps relevant to academics, but in this case McBay's area of interest is importantly different: if a city is buried in silt, its environmental management efforts failed.  To anthropologists, the culture and often the state can move to another city without any relevant discontinuities.  Of course, this process, added up over regions and larger timescales, can perhaps (partially) explain, for instance, the gradual shift in power away from Mesopotamia and into Europe.  And it allows collapse to be both a defining trait of civilization, as McBay would have it, and a process that is truly relevant only in isolated, marginal cases, as some anthropologists argue. 

Thus, the archaeological record makes it clear that collapse is an important process in history, one that is not necessarily inevitable but that certainly happens more often than not to complex, state-level societies.  However, the implications for modern global system are ambiguous.  It seems hard to argue that collapse isn't coming, but it is an open question what precisely will collapse (the UN, the global food market, the American empire, etc) and how.  It is even more uncertain what we can and should do about it.  I'll explore these questions further in a future post.

References

            Carter, Vernon G. Topsoil and Civilization. University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, Print.

            Diamond, Jared. Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

            Huesemann, M, and Huesemann, J, 2008. Will progress in science and technology avert or accelerate global collapse? A critical analysis and policy recommendations.  Environmental Development and Sustainability, Vol. 10, pp. 787-825.

            Jensen, Derrick. Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization. Seven Stories Press, 2006. Print.

            Johnson, A. W., and T. Earle. The evolution of human societies. California: Stanford University Press, 1987. Print.

McBay, A, Keith, L, and Jensen, D. Deep Green Resistance. Seven Stories Press, 2011. Print.   

            Meadows, Donella H. Limits To Growth. Signet, 1972. Print.

            Montgomery, D. Dirt : the erosion of civilizations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

            Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization. Countryman Press, 2005, Print.

            Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse Of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

Progress Report

I have started to see many of the conclusions I drew earlier in the term as unfair to DGR authors.  For instance, it's true that Jensen's schema works when you ignore the margins, it's true that McBay understands the implications of anthro (Tainter specifically) for collapse activism, and it's true that the civilization anthro arguments are irrelevant to determining whether to do collapse activism.  On an intellectual level, they are still unpleasant, but they are not really mistakes so much as (potentially poor) choices.  To some extent, I acknowledge that they just aren't emphasizing the things I'd like to see emphasized - they are simply different people with different perspectives on what's important.  To some extent there's also some legit intellectual faux pas's going on.  So gotta parse those out.

However, I am, atm, convinced that the collapse analysis (conclusions I drew more recently) is not evidence-based and is deeply flawed by its reliance on unfalsifiable opinions of the DGR authors.  This is a flaw bought into by all the other Peak Oil authors too.  While I'd still tend to agree with DGR, that's not necessarily because they have any better reason to be right - just that their prejudices and dispositions align with mine.  So this makes me less comfortable doing what they so or even advocating it.

summary:

Jensen does a bad job using evidence about indigenous peoples in his arguments:
- land use claims not necessarily true, misleading, unnecessary
- warfare and child/spouse abuse claims overgeneralized, misleading, insufficiently specific and caveated
- because his sources are this eclectic bunch of old kooky iconoclasts, not mainstream anthropologists who are studying this shit
BUT that's not so much a problem for his argument, because his civ/indigenous division broadly matches the anthropological consensus between the 99.8% of human history family level society and the dominant social mode over the last ~6000 years, which is his point

Jensen's argument about collapse is uncomfortably Apocalyptic
- the specifics of the 'collapse' narratives in DGR are still too vague - they don't lay out what collapse actually is in sufficient detail to overcome the legacy of 'the world is ending' bullshit
- Jensen/McBay/Keith don't sufficiently investigate how civilization emerged, which is supposed to hamper their understanding of how it could collapse
BUT McBay does take into account Tainter's understanding of collapse and apply it to activism (increase costs of civilization and create an attractive alternative)
 - though Tainter is not necessarily the modern anthropological point of view, and a single-minded acceptance of his view of history may be overconfident and/or cherry-picking on the part of DGR

- while I buy a lot of the claims DGR makes about what is and is not plausible for the future (as opposed to claims made by other peak oil authors like Lester Brown, Trainer, etc), I see that this is based more on ideology and personality than on evidence and reality
- failing to include evidence for their claims makes DGR no different from the rest of the peak oil books - they're just selling the same idea in a different style to a more radically minded audience; as long as their argument hinges on things like an acceptance of anti-capitalism, rather than a realistic constrainment of the possible/plausible future paths of capitalism, they will never convince anyone outside their ideological bubble and it will remain an ideological claim, not a serious social wake-up call

All that said, DGR still poses some major questions to the activist community overall that have not been addressed and responded to sufficiently, regardless of how "right" they are.

What I've Gotten Out of This Experience

While my experience has been structured as an academic, intellectual endeavor, the most valuable things I've taken from these courses has been more personal. I have delved into the anthropological debate on 'civilization' and the 'evolution' of human societies, and have come away much wiser from that process. I've also learned much about the intellectual precedents and background of Derrick Jensen himself, which has enlightened his works for me substantially.

However, the value of the courses has been in neither of those things, but in several aspects of the 'intellectual molting' (thanks Andrew, for that phrase!) it has catalyzed.

Intellectually, the courses supplied the activation energy to critically examine my beliefs. As a liberally educated person with a commitment to rigorous consideration of my beliefs and actions, I liked to think that my positions and opinions were expressed not arbitrarily, but based on thorough consideration of the evidence. Yet my near-total approval of Jensen et al.'s argument should have tipped me off that this faculty was not sufficiently applied in this case. Through both of these courses, I've come to see the flaws in his arguments, which should have been apparent to me in the first place.

This has taught me that I really can't be trusted to know when my opinions are sufficiently rigorous; or, to put that another way, I should always assume they are somewhat flawed and limited. Hopefully in the future I will be able to apply a wider rigor and delve into a thinker's intellectual context and history more thoroughly the moment I catch myself buying in to an idea too completely.  In the case of an argument as broad and far-reaching as Jensen's, this is especially necessary since the systems under consideration are so vast and complicated. This is another major lesson: humility. It is vain of me to believe I can really understand the history of societal evolution in a few soundbites, and even more so to believe I have any special understanding of the future of industrial civilization.

That humility is expressed in a more personal way. My motivation in embarking on the intellectual journey Jensen largely inspired was to determine, to paraphrase a Jensen title, "How I should live my life." The implicit assumption was that, if I considered the question carefully enough, my life could become a well-placed bullet that would somehow fatally wound the source of bad things in the world (determining whether or not this was civilization was part of the investigation). This was predicated on an even vaster arrogance, in which my life somehow presented opportunities to shift the whole course of human history. Chaia Heller, in "For the Love of Nature: Ecology and the Cult of the Romantic," suggests that this arrogant presumption derives from an inappropriate trope in which nature is a sort of 'damsel in distress' who needs brilliant young environmentalists with pure souls to save her. I found that argument revealing, and I imagine there is something to it.

The realization that I can't and shouldn't view my life in this way has been hugely freeing in a subtle way. I have by no means turned my back on my responsibility to help me community in really effective ways. However, I have abandoned the presumption that I am somehow above the mundane drop-in-the-bucket tasks that are available to me, that my life is for some reason destined for some more magically effective activist work. This has shifted my perspective in an important way: I need to choose my activist path based on what I want to do and trust that this will lead me in the right direction.

Now I just need to figure out what I want to do! Or at least, what I want to try first. Fortunately, much of what I want to do fits in very well with the constructive side of the very necessary movement. I want to explore the natural world and develop a working relationship with a real community through land-health oriented agriculture. I want to share the things I discover with people who don't know about them! These are precisely the sorts of things that are supposed to be part of building just and sustainable alternatives to capitalism and civilization. So I suppose I should begin/continue doing them, and feel gratified that I'm doing my part in my own unique way.

That is, I've come to see my quest for complete intellectual rigor and completeness to be somewhat farcical, at least insofar as it has become a prerequisite for or an alternative to action. I now see that action will always be a leap of faith and that doing things with full vigor is one of the best ways to advance one's intellectual vision. I'm not sure to what extent I really held back doing things because I felt my understanding was still too incomplete, but that excuse has fallen away psychologically, at least.

While I am apprehensive about saying this because I don't want to question the need for confident action, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the way Derrick avoids embracing the uncertainties inherent in the questions he addresses. Authors like David Abram, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, etc seem to focus on the limitations of their perspectives a bit more, to be more cautious and perspicacious with their philosophies. I can imagine that Derrick may have chosen to avoid those questions on purpose, to strengthen the indubitability of his arguments, but I feel that it ultimately weakens them, makes them vulnerable to red herring critiques in which the important messages he has are disregarded because, for instance, his anthropology is underdeveloped and misleading.

A Question of Sources

Derrick Jensen’s definition of a civilization is primarily ecological: cities depend on resource importation to support populations above local carrying capacity. As an environmentalist thinker, he sees the consequences of this as predominately ecological: the first premise of Endgame is that civilization is not sustainable. Yet Derrick’s discussion of civilization rarely discusses its origins in ecological terms, which is a strange omission. In some sense, perhaps, the question of origins is academic – once it came about, it had consequences Jensen cites. However, I’d argue that the question of origins provides substantial nuance, accuracy, and perspective to the questions Jensen is interested in discussing. Its omission leaves Derrick’s analysis naïve and simplistic in several areas. Derrick seems to have taken an alternative approach to the nature of civilization from several of his major intellectual influences – R.D. Laing, Stanley Diamond, and Lewis Mumford, among perhaps several others.


Laing, a psychotherapist, addressed the question of civilization only in certain interpretations. His critiques of modern society and its effects on the individual, however, had a substantial influence on the way Jensen analyzed the ideological aspects of civilization. Laing provided a key insight to Jensen: reality as experienced by an individual can be manipulated by the behavior of others. Those in any position of power can invalidate the experience of others in order to create a reality that legitimates their power. Thus,

“Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on "bringing it up". He may invalidate her experience. This can be done-more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: "It’s all in your imagination." Further still, he can invalidate the content. "It never happened that way." Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.”

For Jensen, this analysis can be applied just as well to the ideologies that perpetuate class inequality or justify destruction of habitat as to the mentally manipulative, presumably abusive relationship between Jack and Jill. By raising all children in a culture of abuse, abusive relationships become the norm, the ground from which all things are judged, so a great measure of civilization’s abuses are overlooked and tacitly accepted. While Laing never states this dichotomy explicitly, the implication for him is that there is a healthy alternative in which abuse is culturally named and shamed; this alternative is defined by Jensen as a non-civilized or indigenous lifestyle.


The essential nature of civilization is thus taken to be this redefinition of reality to suit power. Rather than focusing on the ecological conditions that permitted power to arise and the community-level cost-benefit analyses that must have sanctioned the rise of power, Jensen takes the rise of civilization for granted. It emerged in the world around 10,000 years ago through some sort of miracle. Jensen’s influence Jack Forbes termed it Wetiko disease, an illness of the soul, something that could simply emerge to blight humanity without any relevant proximate causes. Lewis Mumford analyzed the rise of civilization in a historical light, but ultimately failed to see the problem any differently. As he put it,

"why this "civilized" technical complex should have been regarded as an unqualified triumph, and why the human race has endured it so long, will always be one of the puzzles of history,"

thus precluding any critical examination of this rather important question. He too seems to believe that the peculiar set of beliefs that defines civilization are like a virus, arising spontaneously through random mutation and expanding until it exhausts its hosts. Avoiding intellectually critical examinations of such interesting questions seems to be a theme in Mumford’s works, one which he unfortunately passed on to Derrick. Mumford was writing in a different time, with different expectations of its public intellectuals.  Much of “The Myth of the Machine” seems to be based on Mumford’s personal speculations, systematically failing to engage scholarly debates on the questions he investigates. This definitional question of ‘civilization’ seems to be an important case in point as regards Jensen’s thinking. Mumford seems to have lumped all human societies into two groups, with no gradation in between (which explains his flabbergasted silence about why anyone would ever agree to become civilized in the first place) without addressing the substantial anthropological evidence that discredits this scheme. By the time Jensen picked up Mumford’s dichotomy, the failure to address the substantial added nuance in the anthropological literature is even more acute.

In Chapter One of “In Search of the Primitive,” Stanley Diamond gives an appraisal of civilization that is substantially more grounded in the anthropological literature. Yet he too seems to fall prey to this facile dichotomy of civilized/uncivilized. His analysis of civilization again focuses on its ideologies and social effects. He discusses the appropriation of culture by the powerful, the inherent class struggles of civilization and the repression required to maintain them, and the ultimate progressive narrative that justifies the edifice to this day. But again, never does he mention the ecological reasons that brought civilization to being in the first place and allowed it to continue and expand.


In Diamond's case, this is an artifact of the context in which he was writing and the goal of the piece. "Civilization and Progress" was written to combat the idea that non-civilized peoples were "savages" and "primitives," still a concern in the social sciences of Diamond's time, a clear legacy from the time anthropology was an appendage of colonialism.  Diamond marshals a substantial body of evidence to prove the point that social ills that plague civilized peoples are absent in the indigenous.  His evidence thus supports Jensen's argument well.  However, Diamond is not creating a robust explanatory framework capable of accepting new evidence and answering interesting questions about what civilization is and how it came to be.  This is the sort of framework Jensen ought to be basing his arguments on, and Diamond is simply an inappropriate source for that.


For a thinker so overwhelmingly identified and concerned with environmental issues, it seems strange that Jensen would overlook them in appraising his intellectual influences. This oversight may seem academic, but it undermines many of Jensen’s explicit theses and hinders his ability to make clear strategic choices about fighting the manifold environmental and social ills associated with civilization. By failing to address the circumstances that cause what he calls civilization, Jensen precludes a realistic, useful analysis of what could be done to stop it. If there is an ecological reason for civilized social structures, then a political revolution will not change it – the solution must also be ecological.


Jensen’s failure to analyze civilization as a historical, evolutionary phenomenon may have some sort of unconscious justification in propaganda. If civilization is framed as a disease, something that afflicts humans but is not ultimately human; something that may as well have come from space, then it is easy to rally activists to fight it. If it is instead framed as a naturally emerging response to particular environmental conditions, the situation will seem fatalistic to many and perhaps fighting it may not seem like such a plausible or appropriate response. With that said, however, it’s true that many presumably logical thinkers before Jensen came at the problem in the same way without being influenced by a comparable commitment to the anti-civilizationist platform.

N.B. - Alternative, more appropriate explanatory frameworks and their contrasts with Jensen's analysis are examined here.

Civilization?

Derrick Jensen's first premise is that "Civilization is not and can never be sustainable." He is relatively unique among activist voices in naming 'civilization' as the culprit in the host of social and ecological problems we face. Whereas others see patriarchy, fossil fuels, capitalism, or a spiritual estrangement from the land as the root of these problems, Jensen traces them back to the beginning of agriculture and cities, wherever they emerged. This analysis has the advantage of explaining both modern depredations and injustices and their continuity with ancient ones. It explains deforestation in British Columbia and Borneo as well as deforestation in Lebanon and Iraq. It explains slavery in Egypt and slavery on southern tobacco plantations and wage slavery in much of the modern developing world. It is an elegant, inclusive theory that seems to account for the evidence better than its peers among pop-activism writing.

But how well does Jensen's thesis square with the most recent opinions of anthropologists studying comparative social organization? I began my investigation by surveying the debate among anthropologists about the "evolution" of human societies. This concept is the scholarly equivalent of Jensen's civilized-non-civilized dichotomy.

In "The Evolution of Human Societies," Tim Earle and Allen Johnson develop an environmental theory based largely on population density to explain transitions between various levels of social integration - the family-level, local group level, and the regional polity level, each of which include finer gradations. These gradations immediately made clear to me the incredible diversity of human modes of living that Jensen was collapsing into his simplistic dichotomy.

Earle and Johnson argue that humans tend to want to live more or less at what they call the family level, and that any attempt to infringe on the autonomy of the family is actively discouraged by the community (see Chris Boehm's argument that egalitarian societies must strictly enforce that state). However, there are many situations in which the benefits of autonomy are outstripped by its costs. For instance, the necessity to organize and construct large whaling boats allows some individuals to gain slightly greater power in Tareumiut communities. In some densely populated agrarian societies, it may become necessary to create even larger political structures to build, for instance, irrigation systems. Earle and Johnson identify four categories through which relative environmental changes (of all different sorts) may make integration desirable to a community: warfare, risk management, technology, and trade. In each category, the community benefits from some activity that requires greater initial investment than any family can provide alone.  They emphasize equally the desire of proto-leaders for power and the very real needs the community has to sacrifice autonomy to those individuals.  It is a bargain (and it may be a bad one) that is entered into for the relative benefit of both parties in response to a new environmental or social situation.

In "Power and Legitimation," (unfortunately not available online) Peter Peregrine adds further nuance to the evolutionary schema. He points out that state and chiefdom level leaders can maintain their authority and the stability of their regime (that is, the stability of the political integration) using tactics along three dimensions he identifies: network to corporate, terroristic to volunteeristic, and sacred to secular. The latter two are more of less self-explanatory. Network systems depend on cultural engagement with neighboring clans. Leaders rule by controlling prestige goods and trade. Corporate groups focus on the benefits of being in the group - the system is maintained by an awareness of its contribution to social welfare, rather than through a monopoly on cultural power. These criteria add another layer of nuance to the evolutionary framework.


What do these investigations have to say about Jensen's ideas? At first blush, they discredit Jensen's ideas as naively oversimplified and of limited explanatory power. However, they are by no means inconsistent with the general jist of Jensen's argument. It does seem to be the case that stratification, control, conflict, malnourishment, environmental degradation, etc, are much more pronounced in more integrated societies. It could be argued that Jensen's argument is irresponsible in its oversimplification, but not wrong in any meaningful way, except in the margins between family level societies (which are more or less equivalent to the non-civilized ideal Jensen presents, and which were the only form of social organization on Earth until the Holocene) and state-level societies (equivalent to Jensen's "civilization").

Yet Jensen's analysis is not so easily absolved from criticism. By ignoring the complex reality of diversity in societal evolution, he shows that he is more interested in facile rhetoric than in real intellectual debate and scholarship. John Michael Greer puts this better than I can:

"these claims reduce history to a morality play in which all human cultures, in their richness and moral complexity, are forced into two-dimensional roles as good guys or bad guys. This sort of moralizing is fine if your goal is cultivating self-righteous indignation, but it's a good deal less useful in the quest for understanding." (The Long Descent)

This reduction serves a propagandist purpose for Jensen: if it is not that case that civilization is *always* unsustainable, or *always* unjust and founded on violence, then the answer to civilization's ills is to emulate the civilizations who did the things we like, not to scrap the concept altogether. In order to break the stranglehold the idea of civilization has in the minds of those who grow up in it, Jensen clearly feels he must remove the possibility that it can be redeemed.

While he may have judged the poles of social evolution more or less correctly, his consideration of the causes and origins of civilization is sorely lacking. To anthropologists, this is the most interesting question - they seek to build theories that explain diversity and change. Jensen's predecessor and major influence, Jack Forbes, characterizes civilization as a symptom of "wetiko disease," a psychological malaise that is easily transmitted and hurts both its hosts and those around them. By characterizing this social organization as a disease, it becomes something exogenous, something that can be cured by a sort of social antibiotic. Jensen's own perspective is slightly more useful: he seems to treat it as a result of the adoption of agriculture and the power-hunger and greed of those who became the elites. These are both relevant factors. However, power-hungry individuals can exist in any society - they need the opportunity to take power in order to become a problem. And agriculture also exists in what Jensen would consider non-civilized peoples (especially the local group and chiefdom level societies discussed in Earle and Johnson). Jensen never satisfactorily addresses why civilization may have emerged where and when and how it did.

In some sense, this doesn't matter. The origin of civilization is, as Daniel Dennett so elegantly phrases it "an open empirical question on which we could revise our opinion without collapse of the theory if the evidence warranted." It could very easily be the case that civilization is inevitable, part of human nature, and that if we destroy it, they'll just build it again. That doesn't mean it's not worth destroying industrial civilization right now. That's a different part of the argument, fundamentally. (I'm sure Derrick would use some nice analogy involving a man with a gun to your head or copious amounts of bleeding to illustrate this point :P)

On the other hand, it may matter quite a bit. The anthropological perspective acknowledges the cost-benefit trade-offs that have been made to reach civilization.  Each sacrifice of autonomy was a rational choice in its ecological and social context, in the evolutionary sense of "rational."  For that reason, there is a ratcheting effect that makes those trade-offs nearly impossible to reverse intentionally unless there are fundamental changes to the cost-benefit equation. Changes to the cost-benefit equation are not the sort of thing activists can bring about - they will either happen on their own, due to resource draw-down, and some more or less gradual collapse will occur, or something else will happen (which seem unlikely, but the present was probably once an unlikely future). Though that whole situation is probably too complicated for me to speculate about. Industrial civilization may be vulnerable enough that it would collapse with the impetus of some serious infrastructure blows, or it may be more resilient than that. David Abram may be right that civilization is a sort of Chinese finger trap, and struggling to force its collapse may do nothing more than tighten the noose of the police state.  

Introduction and Greetings

My name is Adam Kranz.  I am presently a Junior Environmental Studies Major at Lawrence University.  I live in an environmental activist coop house called Greenfire.  I lead actions with Greenfire and spend much of my time doing organic, intensive agriculture at the Sustainable Lawrence University Gardens, SLUG.  I was arrested in the Tar Sands Action on September 2, 2011, to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and begin slowing the tar sands industry.

While my activism and interest has focused on environmental issues, I have come to the conclusion that oppression in nearly all its forms - from issues of gender, race, and sexuality to wealth inequality to environmental justice to class warfare are all deeply connected and stem from the same ultimate causes.  Thus I feel that these issues can and should be addressed together, at their root causes.  In my search to pin down the nature and origin of this root cause, I came to realize that it was by no means a recent problem - neither the Powell Memo nor the Industrial Revolution can be blamed for these systemic issues.  In fact, the problems seemed to go back as far as recorded history, and most of the authors I read seemed to believe that the emergence of written history itself, as a symptom of the broader emergence of what they called "civilization," was the problem.

The major influences that led me to these ideas were Crimethinc. and Derrick Jensen.  Jensen has been my primary intellectual influence since I moved away from Crimethinc a few years ago.  His writing is incredibly powerful and his analysis has much to offer.  I have learned a great deal of things I value greatly from his writings.  His perspective throws out many conventional assumptions and comes at problems from an admirably non-traditional viewpoint.

Yet that is not to say that his thought is itself objective or scientific.  For while Jensen may have arrived at his ideas by throwing out sacred assumptions like "civilization is good," he has replaced those assumptions with many of his own.  These assumptions vary in the extent to which they are grounded in fact or legitimized by more scientific perspectives.  As I read Derrick's works, I often felt muddle-headed.  The things he said made the most sense to me, I could critique the positions of others in light of his arguments, and I saw few explicit flaws in his seemingly-airtight reasoning.  But there was a lingering feeling that he was doing something to my head.  He is, as "all writers are," a propagandist, and he happens to be a very good one if you're at all amenable to his bent.

I went into college with the assumption that its primary aim would be to help me develop my own worldview. It turns out that Lawrence these days, for better and for worse, thinks of a worldview as something too political to touch and too personal to be developed in an academic framework.  So I floundered about for two and a half years, frustrated that no one ever seemed to talk about the issues in Environmental Studies that drew me to the subject in the first place, the questions that would help me analyze and develop my worldview and thus calibrate effectively the way I spent my life (starting from the perhaps strange assumption that I ought to live my life according to my own view of what was right despite my understanding that there is no objective morality in the Universe).  After talking over my issue with some older students, it occurred to me that the best way to resolve my problem was to seek out professors with whom I could address my questions head-on.

That is the purpose of this blog.  With the help of a professor of Environmental History and a Professor of Anthropology, I'm carrying out two independent studies to identify and examine the claims and arguments Jensen makes in a critical academic context.  I plan to post here periodically on my findings, in the perhaps vain belief that there are other people out there who are seeking out just this sort of friendly critique (something I couldn't find anywhere else online).

N.B. - The blog's title refers to the writings of Deep Green Resistance in general, embodied in Derrick's writings as well as the book by Lierre Kieth and Aric McBay by that title, not the latter book in particular.