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.