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.