Month: November 2018

Although the human population is rapidly approaching 8 billion, Homo sapiens is rapidly becoming extinct. Very few are left. They have been replaced by a competitor species, an invasive non-indigenous species that consumes Homo sapiens’ habitat—and preemptively kills all potential competition. This new species has yet to be given an official name. I suggest “Homo corporatum,” corporate man.

Imagine what it must have been like—and what it must still be like for the remaining few authentic humans—to wake up embedded within an intimate community of fellow beings, to greet the day and take in the sunrise as communion, to walk on legs that know the shape of the local terrain as muscle memory, to feast on the scent of pine or prairie or sunbaked sand, and bathe in the caress of birdcall and perpetual insect chatter, to slake your thirst with sweet spring water.

How different that was (and is) when compared to the life of Homo coporatum, who gets slapped out of fitful sleep by a shrill electronic screech and pushed into the day by weighty commitment underwritten my fear and anxiety, who’s first sights are images of death and distraction flitting across a glossy palm-held screen, who’s first thoughts are of the crushing emptiness that will fill her day, the treadmill that she must mount for a tedious day-long walk to nowhere at all, the whip of debt that stings her back. There is comradery in the trenches, but comradery is not community. It is a desperate mutual attempt to administer a brief social analgesic, a momentary distraction from the perpetual torment of a life wasted in the service of a machine designed to destroy all life in a million different and exceedingly painful ways.

And lest you think I am merely waxing darkly poetic, here is a thought experiment that might help to put things into perspective. Pick a typical day, one that does not stand out in any way from the day that preceded it or the one you expect to follow, pick a typical Tuesday, for example. In your mind, quickly map out a timeline that includes the mundane details of your schedule, what it is that you actually do, your moment-to-moment activity from the time you wake up until you fall back into bed. Now, go back through the timeline you have just mapped out and identify those moments in which you are actually in control of what you do. Are there any? Is there a single place, anywhere, a tiny slice of time when you have something that even remotely approaches free choice, where you can, with all honestly, say that you would choose to do exactly this if you could choose among all possible things to do? If so, where is that place on your timeline? It is not on your morning commute. It is not at your desk or worksite or delivery route. It is not during your restricted lunchbreak or your commute home. It is not when you collapse into the couch with a drink and the remote control.

And I know that it may be tempting to run this thought experiment and pretend that it is all good, that you like your job—and that you are thankful to have a job! But this is simple rationalization driven by cognitive dissonance, identical in form to the rationalization of a slave who has given up dreaming of freedom.

The civilized status quo is vindicated and perpetuated in part through a set of false beliefs. I am calling these beliefs orthodoxies because their status as grounding principles renders them immune to normal methods of criticism. Many of these beliefs correspond to what French sociologist Pierre Bourdeau called doxa: the undergirding, unexamined, unspoken, taken-for-granted truths of society. Some of these fall beyond mere orthodoxy and into the realm of the sacrosanct. To challenge these “truths” of civilization is to challenge core notions about what it means to be a human being.

I have listed several of these false orthodoxies below, briefly annotated with summary indications of their speciousness. Note that the ones that I have chosen apply specifically to “Western” civilization; however, the rate and scope of globalization in recent years has made the distinction increasingly irrelevant.

 

False beliefs about the nature of human nature:

1. There is a sharp separation between the human world and the natural world

This is an archaic and logically unsupportable belief associated with dominant monotheistic religious traditions.

2. Humans are a superior species

This false belief emerges from lifestyles based on domestication, and receives doctrinal validation through monotheistic religious tradition. 

3. Nature is something to be subdued and dominated, and humans have a right/responsibility to exercise dominion over the natural world.

This variation on “might makes right” also derives from lifestyles based on domestication and receives validation through monotheistic religious tradition, and more recently through the demonstrated successes of modern science.

4. Humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive

Material acquisitiveness and competition are responses to artificial restriction of, and unequal access to, resources.

5. Humans are violent by nature

Humans in their natural state (small subsistence foraging groups in direct contact with the natural environment) are remarkably peaceful, and typically employ sophisticated and highly effective methods for settling disputes long before they reach the point of violent confrontation.

6. Social stratification is natural for humans

Humans in their natural state are largely egalitarian. The kind of steep social stratification seen with civilization emerged historically from the division of labor necessary for large-scale agriculture, has spread through millennia of military conquest, and is maintained in the present day through institutionalized violence.

 

False beliefs about the nature of civilization:

7. Civilization is an inevitable product of human evolution

Humans alive today are biologically the same as those living 50,000 years ago (and only trivially different than those living 250,000 years ago), but civilization is less than a few thousand years old. Civilization is a historically-traceable cultural innovation, not a biological adaptation.

8. Life outside of civilization is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

Each adjective in this Hobbesian claim is easily refuted by ethnographic and archaeological data, and by simple logic. 

9. We need civilization

A simple tautology: people who live civilized lifestyles need the various things that living a civilized lifestyle require.

10. Civilization is the best way for humans to live

This is simple chauvinism.

11. Civilization is designed to satisfy human needs

Civilization organizes human behavior in ways designed to serve the needs of the civilized order itself.

12. Civilization actually satisfies human needs

Individual human needs almost always take a back seat to the needs of the civilized order. Several authentic human needs are at present either only partially satisfied or neglected entirely.

 

False beliefs about progress:

13. The future existence of the human species is important

This false belief is tied to the need to assign a larger meaning and purpose for our individual lives, and serves as a means of coping with our individual mortality.

14. Progress is desirable and inevitable

The idea of progress is a delusion supported by hindsight evaluations of specific technological and cultural innovations. Progress implies a direction and a goal, both of which turn up missing in any attempt at a more objective analysis of history.

15. Progress is the solution to our present problems

All solutions to present problems create unanticipated problems of their own.

16. Technological innovation is desirable and inevitable

This is largely a corollary to false belief 14.

17. Technological innovation is the solution to our present problems

This is largely a corollary to false belief 15. When it comes to solving problems, technological innovation is a zero-sum game: solving a proximal (for one group of people, now) problem always creates distal (for other people or at a future time) problems.

18. Science serves human interests

Science serves the interests of people living lifestyles supported by science. Science presently operates according to the cluster of interests established by global consumer-industrial society. Several of the results of science are blatantly opposed to authentic human interests (e.g., biological and thermonuclear weapons, corporate marketing).   

 

False beliefs about the end of the world:

19. The end of civilization means the end of the world

From a civilized perspective, only the human-built world is truly important and worthy of consideration.

20. The end of civilization means chaos

This traces directly back to false belief 8, that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short outside of the structure provided by civilization. This also assumes false beliefs 4, 5 and 6.

21. It’s too late to change now: you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube

Both the belief in progress and the belief in the inevitability of civilization are behind this orthodoxy. This is perhaps the most disturbing false belief of all because of the ease with which belief in our own helplessness and impotence becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

A foggy haze, a pall, hangs pinkly across the brambles by the highway. An old man—or perhaps he is just carrying himself that way, hunched over with slow careful movements, and perhaps he is not a man at all, but he looks to be old from this distance, so maybe it is merely my faltering eyesight, maybe it is the work of the morning haze, although the haze appears to be limited to the skyward direction, apparent only in the leading edge of the sun that has yet to crest the hillside beyond the brambles, beyond the highway—swings open the large metal gates, gates painted in the off-orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge, and locks them against their posts on the outside of the private gravel road that connects the street with the parking lot shared by the cannabis shop and the small coffee shack along the highway.

I am surprised by this, by the old man—if he is really a man, and if he really is old. His car is still running, pulled partially into the road—really a large driveway—and I can see the foggy effluence from the exhaust. It is an old man’s car, a large white vehicle, perhaps ten years old, that looks like it might have been a luxury model, or what passes for that these days. The fact that he is old surprises me. The cannabis shop and the coffee shack are the only businesses served by this road, and, space wise, the cannabis shop dominates. It is a narrow modular—essentially a trailer—with a large older motor home behind it, presumably so that the owners or someone in their employ can spend the night on the property to lessen the temptation for theft that a cannabis shop represents. The coffee shack is little more than a prefab wooden shed, like one you might see in a back yard filled with a riding lawn mower and miscellaneous yard tools. It is painted a happy blue with white trim. Last year it had a different name as was painted hot pink, although the menu on the front hasn’t changed. I am surprised he is old because cannabis is a young-person’s business, in my mind at least, and he appears to be a respectable older gentleman. But, again, my failing eyesight and the distance render my judgement suspect. And the world is not at all the same place as it was when my stereotypes about age and cannabis were first formed.

The only other visible living things, besides me, the dog, and the old man, and a crow on the road behind the old man and his car, are the spiders in large webs displayed like dream catchers, draped in silver and rendered opaque this morning by the dew, each with their sole occupant positioned in the exact center like the frayed bullseye of a cracked dart board. There are four of them as I exit the breezeway connecting the apartment building to the adjacent covered parking area. They are suspended between the building and a large cluster of ornamental shrubs. Each is arranged vertically, but angled differently, as if reflecting four facets of a gemstone. They shimmer like gems in the pink-tinged pre-sunshine, but are otherwise perfectly motionless. Together they form a column-shaped gauntlet with no clearly discernible entrance and death as the only possible exit.