The essays, personal reflections, and prose poems in this book map the broader topography of a single premise: civilization is not our natural habitat. Humans were formed along the contours of radically different modes of being than the ones civilization presents for us. Civilization is incompatible with our evolutionary design in fundamental ways. And civilization itself is the problem. It’s not a particular kind of civilization or a particular historical stage in the development of civilization. It’s civilization as a lifestyle, as a system of control, as a way of organizing human behavior, as a complex assemblage of means for directing and redirecting the activity of individual human beings toward ends that are not even remotely human.
Civilization is buttressed upon several orthodoxies that preach the separation of humans from wild nature. Civilized humans are thought to be above nature, outside nature, either by divine decree or by dint of sheer intellectual prowess: humans are animals, but they are not mere animals, they are superior beings occupying a realm that exists within and yet somehow beyond the mundane physical world. What emerges from these orthodoxies is a profoundly antagonistic relationship between civilized humanity and the natural world. Or perhaps I should say an antagonistic lack of relationship, although even this presupposes the possibility of at least a minimal degree of separation; false orthodoxies aside, the only relationship there can ever be between humans (civilized or otherwise) and the natural world is one of inclusion. Everything human is, and always will be, entirely subsumed within the natural.
The presumption of human exceptionality is a precondition of civilization, a prerequisite, a presumption necessary for civilization to operate. It provides implicit justification for the exploitation and wanton destruction of natural systems and the callous extermination of indigenous (read: uncivilized) cultures. Civilized lifestyles compel a disconnect from the natural world, not just conceptually but, to an ever-increasing extent, physically as well. We live in climate-controlled dwellings where wild nature is not welcome, and where domestic nature is allowed only in tightly constrained and officially sanctioned forms (houseplants, pets). The artificial extraction and separation of humans from the rest of nature pits the human world and the natural world as competitors, each vying for the upper hand in a winner-takes-all, zero-sum game. “Nature” becomes an enemy to be outflanked, outsmarted, subdued, and, ideally, enslaved.
Although this thought-form appeared in full dress several thousand years ago, perhaps most notably within the early Abrahamic religious tradition,1 the insights of modern secular science have done little to alter either the presumption of exceptionality or civilization’s fundamental humankind-versus-nature antagonism. On the contrary, the prime directive of science has always been to increase human control over natural systems. Total command of nature has been the ultimate goal of science from its earliest beginnings. Science probes Nature in order to learn her secrets for the ultimate purpose of power and control. As Francis Bacon, an early advocate for what would later become the modern scientific approach, put it: “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. We can only command Nature by obeying her, and what in contemplation represents the cause, in operation stands the rule.”2 We need to understand and “obey” the rules of the natural world in order that they might be turned to our advantage in terms of power and control: “command.” It is worth noting in passing here that the words command and obey, along with their synonyms, have meaning only for a civilized mind, a mind whose daily activity is perpetually engaged in the operative schemes of steeply hierarchical power relations.
Scientific insight into the extent to which human life depends on the complex and intricately interleaved activities of natural systems has not led to a concomitant increase in concern for the health and wellbeing of these systems. On the contrary, it has led to intensified efforts to insulate the human world, efforts that invariably damage vulnerable natural systems and create new problems requiring additional human intervention in an ever-escalating spiral of harm and destruction. Examples abound, including the emergence of “superbugs” by the naïve over-prescription of antibiotics and the emergence of “superweeds” by the non-judicious use of herbicides in conjunction with genetically modified crops. Anthropogenic climate change provides the most ominous and extreme example, as the use of carbon-releasing fossil energy to extend human power and control has altered natural systems to the point of threatening all future human life. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that any kind of intervention will be able to ameliorate the climate situation at this point. As I write these very words, a headline sits on my newsfeed proclaiming that the increase in atmospheric carbon years ago exceeded the point-of-no-return threshold of irreversibility. The problem with playing a zero-sum game with Nature is that she holds all the cards. Nature always plays the long game, and “the Earth has all the time in the world.”3
The world? The elevation of the human-created and the devaluation of wild nature are reflected in the language we use. For example, the world and the human world have become synonymous; the end of the world is not usually meant to include the physical planet itself, nor the Earth’s natural systems. Because the human-created is all that really matters, the end of human civilization is the end of the world even if the human species is the only fatality. The non-human part of the natural world is only important to the extent that it serves the goals of civilized humanity. And what’s more, according to deeply entrenched orthodoxy, humans have the unalienable right to act upon the natural world and to exercise their power over nature in whatever ways best accommodate human interests, interests that are invariably short-term and expressed in monetary terms—and, as noted above, not really human.
Belief in human power and privilege has become increasingly bloated with time and technological innovation, finding its most extreme expression in something called transhumanism, the idea that humans will eventually succeed in conquering nature by physically merging with technology: by shedding our biological skin and rendering our consciousness into a collective digital format, the human species will give rise to a galactic super-being of pure technology, a “singularity.” Entitled by narcissistic delusion, empowered by technology, and irreducibly unique among nature’s creatures by self-proclamation, civilized humans have a mandate to exercise ultimate authority over natural systems. Nature is something to be used and humans have the power to make and act upon decisions about how it is to be used. Until our transhuman upgrades arrive on the scene, biological humans are the only beings capable of having this power. The putative sources of this power and the particular subset of people who are allowed to exercise it have changed somewhat over time, but it remains indisputable dogma that nature is something for us to use as we see fit, that it is a neutral resource, just so much stuff available for the satisfaction of human desires, just so much material to be used in the pursuit of our species’ destiny.
The claim of human exceptionality presents an easy target from a strictly logical perspective; a simple appeal to set theory and a single Venn diagram are sufficient: humans and everything human-created are a subset falling entirely inside the bounds of the natural. But it is from within the mountain of blatantly contrary empirical facts that the claim of human exceptionality displays its true absurdity. Here is where the reality-disconnect is most profound. Every one of the empirically testable indicators of human exceptionality that has been offered up over the centuries, higher-order reasoning abilities, or language, or the possession of a moral sense, for example, have been shown—ironically, by modern science—to display strong continuity with the capacities of other creatures. In terms of raw empirical evidence, humans are nothing out of the ordinary. But scientific evidence to the contrary has had little real impact on the orthodoxy of human exceptionality. In response to the accumulation of information about the linguistic, intellectual, moral, and technological capacities of our animal brethren, civilization itself is becoming the sole marker of human greatness. Other animals don’t do civilization. Only humans are capable of such an accomplishment; it is the one thing that most clearly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Despite the glaring evidence to the contrary, belief in human exceptionality and privilege persists. It has to. It is built into the civilized frame. It is such a foundational feature of civilized thought that it would be close to impossible to communicate civilized ideas without it. It is the false orthodoxy from which all other false orthodoxies derive. Remove this from the mix, and civilization pops like a wand-blown soap bubble overinflated by a child’s impatient breath.
From a popularity perspective, anti-civilization rants are nonstarters. Anti-civilization is synonymous with anti-social, or worse, a sign of mental illness. Complaining about the many shortcomings of life in civilized society is one thing, but to denigrate civilization itself as a mode of human habitation is positively sociopathic. Part of this has to do with the fact that the civilized order is all there is at this point. It is vanishingly unlikely that anybody reading these words has ever meaningfully occupied any other form of society (literacy is a signal indication of a modern civilized mind). In addition, civilization employs a variety of extremely effective self-preservation mechanisms, many of which are quite subtle, and target evolved features of human psychology directly, for example by exploiting cognitive dissonance, or by playing on institutional variations of Stockholm syndrome. Civilization becomes the only stage upon which to act out our lives, and the fact that we are acting, that we are playing roles and following scripts and collectively enacting a plotline that we are not allowed to edit, is something we are seldom aware of and rarely permitted to talk about. Civilization becomes what we are. By the time we are adults we are so completely metabolized into the civilized order that any attempt at extraction risks destroying essential parts of our personal identities. In this way civilization not only offers itself as the only acceptable option, it renders the very possibility of alternatives unthinkable (and punishable by lethal force should any such thoughts occur and be acted upon). Also, although our physical being may be fragile and temporary, by identifying with the larger civilized order we are able to think of ourselves as enduring components of something far greater. Through civilization we gain an artificial transcendence, a kind of symbolic immortality; although we die personal deaths, our presence in the world continues in the form of the persistence of those civilized institutions we identified with while alive. Questions about the legitimacy of civilization thus present a direct existential threat, and anyone giving open voice to such questions needs to be dismissed as foolish and irrational, or forcefully muzzled.
But
my real purpose in compiling this collection of essays and personal reflections
is not to denigrate civilization. Despite the occasional surface antagonism,
the message of this book is meant to be one of empowerment through knowledge, specifically
through self-understanding. Within each of us resides a marvelously complex and
powerful being, but much of who we are has been stunted and redirected in ways
that are neither healthy nor, ultimately, human. This book is not meant to be a
blanket indictment of modern society, but rather a call to reembrace our primal
human nature—our authentic human
nature. Civilization is not our natural habitat. Our physical, social, and
psychological expectations are for very different ways of living, features of
which remain open and available to each one of us even now.