Category: Words and Life

[From my 2014 book Anarchist by Design. This seems somehow appropriate, given the apocalyptic media hype about the COVID-19 virus.]

“As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. This is in part because it can imagine revolution, but it can’t imagine abandonment. But even if it could imagine abandonment, it couldn’t defend against it, because abandonment isn’t an attack, it’s just a discontinuance of support. It’s almost impossible to prevent people from doing nothing (which is what abandonment amounts to).” –Daniel Quinn

What would “doing nothing” entail?

Daniel Quinn in his book, Beyond Civilization, sketches the faint outlines of an answer to that question. For Quinn, the answer to “doing nothing” is for like-minded folks to organize and coordinate their collective efforts around ways of making a living together in which each person provides a unique and integral community contribution, similar to what he imagines life in tribal society to be like. Quinn uses the tribal nature of social life in a traveling circus as a model for how we might realign our lives with our species’ evolved hunter-gatherer expectations. A traditional traveling circus is a close-knit community of people involved in the pursuit of a related set of communal goals. Also, and the thing that makes the circus a good model, according to Quinn, is that the circus community exists to a large extent as an autonomous entity, and provides a more egalitarian alternative to the steeply hierarchical lifestyles found in the parent culture.   

A traveling circus is different from a hunter-gatherer band in some fundamental ways, however. First, although everyone might participate in some aspects of community life, the circus involves a highly circumscribed division of labor. A small circus can use only so many acrobats and has no need for multiple lion tamers. In contrast, in a traditional hunter-gatherer band there might be individual people with specific abilities or disabilities, but, generally speaking, everyone is their own lion tamer.

Also, a circus, just like the larger society in which it is embedded, is a delayed-return system in which participating individuals have mediated access to life’s necessities. A circus is a kind of technology. And social life in a circus, no less than social life in larger civilized society, is life organized and structured according to a technological order. A circus is a human community that is organized around a specific set of goals: a community designed to do something. Ancestral hunter-gatherer bands were (and are) simply human communities, period, full stop. This latter difference is not a trivial one. Authentic human society is not organized around a larger purpose or set of goals. It is not designed to do anything. Its mere existence is its own justification for existing. Tribal society is already society that is removed from a truly authentic human mode. Tribes in the way that Quinn envisions a tribe emerged with domestication. Before domestication, there were groups of people living together and helping each other and quarreling with each other and celebrating life with each other. After domestication, you have society structured systematically by kinship affiliation and caste and organized into specializations: slave, farmer, soldier, priest.

There are a couple of additional—and glaring—problems with Quinn’s sketch. First off, to abandon civilization doesn’t mean to abandon the physical spaces occupied by the civilized. At this point, there are vanishingly few places that are not under the direct jurisdiction of the machine—and most of those are in extreme environments (mountains, the arctic, etc.). Quinn envisions his tribes of the non-civilized living within the heart of civilization, inhabiting the same physical places and navigating the same physical and legal infrastructure. Right away, this raises the question of how it is possible to live with civilization without being part of it. Quinn points to the homeless—many of whom in matter of objective fact have managed to do just that—as an example of how it is already being done. The homeless who are homeless by choice live with civilization in the way one might live in a region with a less than hospitable climate. The second problem is that civilization, along with its oppressive systems of authority and control, will continue largely unabated even as individuals abandon it. Quinn sails his boat off the edge of the map by claiming that this is in fact a good thing:  

“Finally, we don’t want the ruling class to disappear overnight. We’re not ready to see the infrastructure of civilization disappear (and may never be). At least for the time being, we want our rulers and leaders to continue to supervise civilization’s drudgery for us—keeping the potholes filled, the sewage and water treatment plants running, and so on.”

My question for Quinn is, once again, who is “we”? If “we” are the individuals who have abandoned civilization, then the rulers and leaders he speaks of are not our rulers and leaders. And, of course, the actual drudgery these powerful people are “supervising” is being performed by human beings who have been forced, coerced, threatened, cajoled, or brainwashed into subservience. In order for Quinn’s “we” to live “beyond civilization” there needs to continue to be a substantial group of oppressed “them” to keep the machine running smoothly.

Nonetheless, I think that Quinn might be on to something. Going beyond civilization—whether we do so intentionally or as an unavoidable consequence of civilization’s inevitable collapse—will involve a return to lifestyles fashioned around small, self-reliant cooperative groups. It’s the transition that will be the truly hard part. Time heals all wounds, and in time many of the wounds caused by the global industrial nightmare will fade as natural systems are once again permitted to enact their homeostatic logic. In the transition, we will be forced to accommodate the toxic dross of the disintegrating technological order.

Perhaps we can take our cue from coastal tide pools, fascinating and unique natural neighborhoods of interdependent organisms sharing limited space and resources. As civilization recedes it will leave isolated pockets of humanity scattered around the globe living—by necessity—in self-reliant cooperative communities. As centralized sources of control deteriorate, local communities will be left to their own recourse, each dependent critically upon cooperation among its individual members. Creatures that live in tide pools are different from their deeper water cousins in that they are far more flexible; they have developed unique strategies to weather dramatic periodic changes in local conditions.

Likewise, it will be the adaptable among us who stand the greatest chance of weathering the transition as we disengage from civilization. But we will be aided in the transition by our evolutionary history and our genetic preparation for life in small hunter-gatherer bands. The primary difference between our future situation in the transition beyond civilization and the typical tide pool is that for tide pools, the sea eventually returns, bringing with it an infusion of water and nutrients. Once global industrial civilization recedes, it will not return—at least not in anything like its current form. And, with luck and in time, it will disappear completely, a brief and forgotten anomaly in the tenure of our species. And the tide pools themselves, the residual effluvia of the technological order, will evaporate leaving only people living authentic human lives for no other purpose than the expression of life itself.

Well, anyhow, that makes for a nice story. Meanwhile a young boy sleeps and dreams his very last dream as a bomb-laden predator drone hovers silently over a small mountain village in western Pakistan…

All change starts with the present moment.

All intentional change involves a comparison between a current state and a desired state that is imagined to exist in some future now. Unfortunately, the comparison itself can serve as a potent obstacle to change: the gulf between reality and desire can seem insurmountable. What is frequently lost in this comparison is that the space between the present moment and the imagined future now is not an empty void. It is a rich and abundant landscape, infinitely furnished, and filled to the brim with present moments just like this one.

The present moment is all we ever have, and all future present moments are grounded in what happens right now. So, we should act right now, in the present moment, as if the desired state has already been achieved. Some Buddhists believe the very moment that you sit, cross your legs, and assume a meditative posture, you have already at that point achieved enlightenment—the end is not something that can be separated from the beginning. And there is this, one of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche:

“If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man [sic], even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always wearing the mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire the power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained—and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent.”

OK, so that really isn’t a word—but it should be.

Ad hominem attacks are the weapon of choice for those who lack a strong counterargument. Among the simplest of ad hominem approaches is the appeal to hypocrisy. And when it comes to promoting primitivism and the re-inhabiting of authentically human forms of life, when it comes to refusing to worship at the sacred altar of institutional dependency, when it comes to technological heresy, when it comes to blaspheming the false orthodoxy of progress, the charge of hypocrisy is an easy one to make: to criticize civilization while simultaneously enjoying its many accoutrement benefits seems clearly hypocritical.

But there are no logical teeth to such a charge. First, even if I am a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. That’s the problem with ad hominem arguments in general: the validity of what is said is independent of the character of the person speaking. I might in fact be a raging lunatic (and there is no shortage of evidence for this!). Even so, I categorically deny the charge of hypocrisy. Merely acting in ways that appear to be inconsistent with what I say is not sufficient. In order to be a hypocrite, consistency needs to be an actual option.

As an analogy, suppose a person is convicted and imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit; does obeying the prison guards and eating prison food qualify as an admission of guilt? Of course not. And neither do I need to live a cellphone-free existence in a cave in the mountains to be able to point out the dehumanizing effects of civilization. The fact of the matter is that it is nearly impossible for me (or any of the civilized) to step outside of the civilized order in any truly meaningful way. I really have no choice but to play along, at least minimally. To do otherwise would mean unbearable social isolation if not an immediate violent death. The charge of hypocrisy simply has no traction.

The charge of heresy, however, cannot be so easily dismissed.

The shape of the space around me makes a difference. From the base of a ravine, the earth appears to contract, the trees lean inward from the ridge, threatening to shut out the sky, and the feeling is a strange composite of vulnerability and strength.

A short time later, perched on the crest of a hill, the land falls away from me in the distance, the vulnerability is gone, and my thoughts move quickly toward the horizon, seeking the very limits of vision.

My childhood was spent in a broad river valley, where the slopes and hillsides were overlaid with asphalt and the view was framed by windows and obscured by rooftops and powerlines, and the principle feeling was of insecurity and apprehension. The meat of my adult life, the muscular middle, was embedded in repurposed wetland prairie, where the land was annually scoured clean of all life, and then forced into surrogacy, an unwilling receptacle of the relentless mechanical impulses of corporate industrial agriculture, where the only distinction among directions was the shape of your shadow, and the feeling was of boundless and accelerating emptiness.

Where I sit right now is an amalgam of each of these. I am surrounded by wetland repurposed to accommodate highways and apartments and condominiums, sitting toward the top of a hillside, with my view framed by a balcony rail and obscured by chimneys. Although the bulk of my horizon is the roof of the building across the pond—like the looming edge of a ravine—through a small gap between the eves I can look down on the back of a crow hopping along the crest of the rooftop of the next building beyond.

My thoughts become black and feathery and start to move with her, seeking the limits of vision, using her eyes as proxies.

Hiking on a familiar trail through a tiny patch of secondary growth forest in Snohomish County, Washington, 120 acres called Southwest County Park. Several places on the trail, my footfalls echo as if the ground is a hollow wooden shell. Beneath my feet I imagine ten thousand years of compacted, root-bound treefall.

There is a larger presence here. Not in a mystical or spiritual sense, but concrete, palpable. The space around me is alive. It is not inert matter. And it is not merely a collection of individual lifeforms piled together, each striving, in concert or in competition, to satisfy their own evolved needs. There is a larger, integrated sentience here. My movement along the path is being registered, felt, experienced. The forest is aware.  

Biologists have only recently started to scratch the surface in terms of understanding the complex interactive exchange of information among the trees themselves, much of it underground and mediated though dense networks of fibrous mycelium, and above ground through a variety of air-born substances that signal the activity of insects, birds, and other animals. Trees even sense the diurnal patterns of shadow from their neighbors and avoid growing in directions that would put them in competition for limited sunshine, a phenomenon called crown shyness. Despite all this, it still sounds strange for me to say that the forest is aware, because I have to use my own conscious experience as the benchmark for awareness.

What would it mean for a forest to be sentient? Where, what, or who would be the locus of awareness? Is awareness, as a concept, even applicable in this case? Is the idea of awareness too limited, too diminutive, too small? Might there be a sentience far more comprehensive, something that so far exceeds the limits of human comprehension that the notion of comprehension itself has no referent, no purchase, no meaning? All of the questions I could possibly ask come from within my limited primate perspective.

Some time ago I was listening to an interview with Alice Walker, the famous poet, on NPR. She was lamenting the loss of civility and the disintegration of empathy. She said—and I’m paraphrasing—that humanity needs to relearn how to be empathetic. We have become too self-centered and too self-absorbed. The word humanity was not a paraphrase. She used that specific word several times.

Humanity. What is that, exactly? There are two ways the term is commonly used. Sometimes it is meant to refer to all human beings taken collectively, as a synonym for the human species. Sometimes it refers to a psychological posture, a disposition toward empathy and compassion. Walker was invoking the former, while bemoaning the scarcity of the latter. Her words were compelling, and her passion was irresistible. Even the most illiberal and cynical listeners would be hard-pressed to disagree with her. Nevertheless, she was wrong. Or, more accurately, what she said, taken at objective face value, was logically absurd and absent of meaningful content. Humanity cannot be empathetic. Humanity is incapable of expressing empathy, or of demonstrating any other psychological—or, for that matter, physical—attribute. Simply put, humanity is not really a thing. Humanity doesn’t exist as an actual entity, as a tangible inhabitant of the universe. Humanity is a rhetorical device.

Humanity doesn’t exist. Anywhere. It never has and never can. Humanity is one of a considerable number of commonly used abstract terms and expressions, such as “the American people” or “the global economy,” that, while they have no actual material designation in the world, nonetheless suggest something of paramount significance is being referenced. There is a particularly pernicious symbolic illusion at play here. Even as shorthand for “the human species,” or simply “humans,” humanity is invariably used in ways that are deceptive and potentially misleading. For example, it has been said that humanity has walked on the moon, when in fact only a dozen individual humans have done so. And if Walker meant to say “the human species needs to become more empathetic,” then she was speaking gibberish—unpoetic gibberish. The human species is as incapable of empathy as it is of walking on the moon. The human species is a taxonomic category, a conceptual convenience, not an actual thing in the world.

Humans, individual human beings, individual people, are actual things in the world. And, while it is true that there are several individual humans who could probably use a little more empathy, there are several folks out there who ooze empathy from their pores. When Walker says that humanity has lost, or is in need of learning, empathy, what is she saying? That there are more and more people who are less and less empathetic? And, further, perhaps, that the world would be a better place if these people could add a bit more empathy into their daily thoughts and actions? Given the context of the conversation, however, it appeared that she intended to mean something more than just this. I do remember her saying, specifically, that humanity needs to “learn” empathy. What does that mean? How can an abstraction learn? Where is this newly acquired knowledge to be housed? And, surely, she didn’t mean that all people need to learn this; such a blanket statement is entirely unwarranted. Again, there are plenty of people who are at this very moment operating at the very top end of the human niceness spectrum. I know several personally.

Perhaps some additional context might help to sort this out. Walker’s NPR interview was given in the midst of congressional hearings relating to a belligerent and misogynistic supreme court justice nominee who had been accused of sexual assault, and on the heels of the President of the United States openly and publicly mocking the nominee’s psychologically wounded accuser in extremely demeaning ways. The man is clearly an oaf who does not deserve to be in any leadership position, no matter how trivial (and by “the man,” I mean both the supreme court nominee who was, unfortunately, confirmed, and the President). The media is saturated to the very brim with similar stories, alongside stories of mass shootings paired with open disdain for any suggestions that something substantive should be done to prevent them, and a number of other clear indicators that empathy—in even the most rudimentary sense of that term—appears to be a rarified element of contemporary society. Walker’s passionate concern is clearly justified. But, again, the dearth of empathy cannot be humanity’s doing. So, if not humanity, then what?

Human empathy is an evolved capacity, an adaptive capacity that came about because of its potent utility as a tool for maintaining group cohesion. In terms of survival value, it is second only to our inborn sense of fairness and the resulting social norms of reciprocity that are a defining feature of the anarchistic and largely egalitarian human lifestyles that predominated up until just the last few thousand years. Neither anarchism nor egalitarianism exist in the modern world. They disappeared among the civilized the moment that the civilized came into being. The elimination of these features of the social landscape is part and parcel of the civilizing process. An egalitarian civilization would not be a civilization. Anarchistic civilization is an oxymoron. Hierarchical divisions of power and sharp inequalities in access to essential resources are necessary conditions for civilization—even stronger, they are, to a large extent, what civilization ultimately is: a complex collection of mechanisms for creating and maintaining the unequal distribution of power and resources. The second you add a power differential to society, the second that people no longer have equal and unrestricted access to essential resources, is the second that empathy starts to lose its survival utility. Modern civilized society pushes empathy to the vanishing point; the degradation of empathy is a direct result of forced participation in a system based on rigged competition, a system that leads to perpetually expanding chasms of inequality, a system that rewards selfishness and overtly punishes empathetic behavior.

Walker is right about the shortage of empathy. But she is wrong to blame humanity or to suggest that humanity can play any role whatsoever in a possible solution. Even if we allow the slippery non-thing of humanity to mean something concrete, humanity has nothing to do with the lack of empathy in the world because the situations Walker is responding to have nothing to do with actual humans. They have to do with the operative design of civilized society, with the complex collection of bureaucratically structured systems of power that are being forcefully imposed on people. Humanity (whatever that really means) isn’t the problem. The problem is global corporate consumer society itself. The problem is civilization.

I remember my first egg salad sandwich. I’m not sure how old I was, perhaps only four. It was a plain, unadulterated sandwich. No pickles. No lettuce. Just hardboiled egg smashed up with cheap mayonnaise inside a single folded slice of margarine-smeared bread—moist, somewhat sweet, gluten-rich, additive-laced, snow-white Wonder Bread. I was an instant fan. And, in retrospect, it wasn’t so much the egg salad itself that I liked, but the way that the margarine-egg salad combination enhanced the spongy-sweetness of the over-processed bread.

Bread was a staple in my diet as a kid. It was a staple for most other American kids during the 1960s and 1970s as well, and probably still is. At the time of my first egg salad sandwich, the average American got upwards of 30% of their daily calories from white bread—a pound and a half per week—and I am pretty sure that my weekly intake was at least average. I don’t eat much bread these days. In fact, I actively avoid it. I regularly go entire months without eating bread in any form whatsoever. For the last eight years or so, I have been eating “Paleo.”

The Paleo diet is not really a diet in the way that word is typically used. Although it is frequently lumped in with other “fad” diets, and often conflated with the high-fat, high-protein Keto diet, the Paleo diet, in its plainest, non-commercial, non-fad form, is simply the use of ancestral lifestyles as a way of framing food choices. It is different from most other diets in that it is primarily proscriptive, merely a list of food genres not to eat, along with loose suggestions about what to eat instead.

A quick rule of thumb with respect to what is allowed and what is disallowed on the Paleo diet is to ask, for each menu item you are considering, “Would this, or something like this, have been available to eat 20,000 years ago?” And if the answer is “No,” then don’t eat it. The basic idea is that humans have evolved to thrive on a wide variety of food substances—we are, after all, omnivores—but the overwhelming bulk of that “evolution” occurred in a hunter-gatherer context, prior to the agricultural revolution. Agricultural products that were not available in a wild form are foreign substances according to our body’s evolved expectations, and our physical systems are not prepared to deal with them to the extent that they are prepared to deal with more authentically human foods. This precludes dairy products, all modern versions of cereal grains, most legumes, and anything assembled from artificial, factory-generated ingredients.  

With all “lifestyle” diets, there are variations in strictness. Some vegetarians still eat eggs and dairy. Some avoid the eggs, and some, vegans, attempt to avoid all animal byproducts entirely. Likewise, with eating Paleo. On the ultra-strict end of things, you have folks who not only avoid grains and legumes, but nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, melons) as well, because most of the edible nightshades are New World foods, and would not have been available to humans in the Pleistocene; in addition, nightshades contain toxic alkaloids and lectins that have been anecdotally linked to immune system issues in sensitive individuals. I am on the opposite end of the Paleo-strictness continuum. Not only do I eat nightshades, but I also eat grains, legumes, and dairy on occasion—an occasional pizza or deli sandwich—and more-than-occasional wine. I estimate that I eat Paleo close to 90% of the time—actually, any way that you choose to measure that 90%: according to calories (90% or more come in a Paleo-approved form) or meals (one or two meals per week might include cheese or grains or legumes).

All diets are controversial. Sometimes the controversy has to do with differing views of the nutritional benefits. Sometimes it has to do with whether the diet is truly effective relative to its stated purpose—in all but a small minority of cases, the main purpose is weight loss. The Paleo diet has proved controversial for both of these reasons. But it is also controversial for another reason. It is controversial because the mere notion that anything humans did prior to civilization could be superior in an unqualified way to what civilized humans are doing now flies in the face of the deeply entrenched orthodoxy of human progress, a demonstrably false orthodoxy that has been with us since at least as far back as the Enlightenment.

***

Civilization is a way of life that, in many ways, runs counter to our evolved physical, social, and psychological expectations as hunter-gatherers, and the mismatch would not be possible to maintain, let alone endure, without a thorough and extremely effective system of justification, a network of beliefs—many of them clearly false—that function to validate and perpetuate the civilized status quo. To challenge these “truths” of civilization is to challenge core notions about what it means to be a human being. The “march of human progress,” the idea that human history is progressive, that human innovation and achievement are continually making things better and better, is a keystone belief. And the fact that it is easily disproven by even the most superficial objective examination of the facts means that it needs to be aggressively defended, actively and proactively.  

In July of 2018, there was an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that got considerable media attention, as scientific articles go, about the discovery of 14,500-year-old bread from an archaeological site in Jordan. The bread that the archeologists found was more along the lines of a tortilla, made from wild harvested grain and the root of an aquatic plant (presumably as a binding agent), and baked in a stone oven by prehistoric people known as the Natufians. The scientific community was supposedly shocked by this finding. Why? What is surprising about a group of people who figured out how to process grass seed in a way that makes it more portable and perhaps more palatable? Imagine that instead of the Natufians we were talking about a group of people in a slum in the Philippines who figured out how to do exactly the same thing. What makes the first case surprising and the second not is that the first is a challenge to the orthodoxy of human progress. Each of the sites I found that reported on this article made a big deal about the dates involved. This “bread” happened too soon to fit easily into the standard narrative of progress. These people were uncivilized, after all. And, in an attempt to assimilate the new information into existing orthodoxy—and in an egregious misapplication of hindsight—it was speculated that the discovery of bread might have played a pivotal role in the beginnings of agriculture itself. The Natufians were living in the part of the world that would later be known as the fertile crescent, the place where the first verifiable large-scale agriculture occurred. The bread’s popularity might have encouraged the intentional cultivation of the grass seed it was made from.

But one of the most flagrant distortions of the findings, in a reflexive attempt to safeguard the orthodoxy of progress, can be seen in an article from the site Geek.com with the headline “Turns Out Early Humans weren’t Paleo – Ancient Bread Oven Discovered.” The article began by denigrating the Paleo diet and its followers: “Paleo dieting is trendy. In essence, its practitioners think it best, or at least try to limit themselves to foods that a few very poorly informed people think early humans ate. Anyone familiar with the bulk of the research on what ancient humans ate could tell you that the practice is silly, but the plan got another nail in the coffin earlier this week.” The folks over at Geek.com are actively antagonistic toward the Paleo diet. And, given that they bill themselves as a technology news weblog, they are clearly committed to promoting the orthodoxy of progress. The use of the pejoratives “silly” and “poorly informed” are not accidental. They reflect a strawman rhetorical strategy designed to nip any potential challenge to the orthodoxy of progress in the bud. Ignoring the fact that the Natufians were not even close to being “early humans”—humans have existed for somewhere between 250,000 and 2.5 million years, depending on how nitpicky you are with your definition of “human”—they are wrong to assume that there is any meaningful relationship between the wild-harvested einkorn grain-tuber flatbread and what ends up on the grocery shelves today, other than that both were baked in an oven. In addition, the Natufian bread meets the major criteria for a Paleo food: wild harvested, non-domesticated, non-GMO seeds milled by hand and mixed with organic wild-harvested tubers is about as far away from Wonder Bread as it is possible to be and still serve as a vehicle for egg salad.

The danger of orthodoxy is that it works behind the scenes, framing our world view and preventing us from detecting critical flaws in our thinking. The orthodoxy of progress crosses political boundaries, showing up in conservative rhetoric and undergirding left-leaning—progressive—ideology. Many folks in the environmental activism community have also fallen prey to its seductive siren song, believing that there are innovative regulatory or technological solutions to the problem of civilization. I cannot count the times I have heard someone say that we should adopt strategy X as a way of slowing down the increase in atmospheric carbon or reducing population growth or limiting species extinction, as if slowing an increase in something or reducing its growth or imposing limits somehow fixes things, or, at the very least, buys us more time so that progress can work its magic. Unfortunately, no matter how much you slow the increase or reduce growth, the fact that things are still increasing and growing means that they are getting progressively worse. Suppose that you had your hand on a burner that was becoming increasingly hot, causing you to suffer increasing levels of pain. Slowing down the rate at which the burner heats up is not going to make your pain go away. You need to pull your hand off the burner for that.

And as far as the Paleo diet goes, food is important, but it is only one part of an authentic human lifestyle. We are also being forced to engage in artificial “processed” behavior and to participate in unnatural forms of interpersonal interaction that leave us socially and emotionally malnourished. The folks over at Geek.com might be right. The Paleo diet might be silly, and its popularity might simply reflect a point in the natural life course of yet another consumer fad. But maybe, just maybe, if you start to eat from an undomesticated plate, you might start to wonder what it would be like to think with an undomesticated mind.

I bought my wife a weeping willow for her birthday shortly after we were married, and planted the three-foot sapling in the middle of our front yard, between the front porch and the main sidewalk. It became apparent almost immediately that my choice of location was a horrible mistake. The particular variety that I purchased can grow up to six feet in a single season, topping out at over fifty feet tall. Weeping willows are relatively “fat” trees as well, with a dripline diameter roughly equal to their height. My feeble attempts to keep the tree in check through pruning only seemed to make it grow faster, and it quickly overwhelmed our small front yard, pushing its way up and over the porch roof, and merging with the basswood and linden trees in the parking strip, shading the sidewalk beneath a dark arboreal tunnel that forced the neighbor kids to duck low as they rode through on their bicycles. One evening, and for no reason other than spontaneous impulse, I took a chainsaw and cut the tree down.

For years afterward, the residual roots would send up shoots that had to be periodically hacked into submission. One spring, I planted a cutting from one of these volunteer shoots out by the river at the far end of the back yard, a spot where it could spread out and express its true nature—where I probably should have planted the tree in the first place. The cutting grew fast. Extremely fast. A decade later, when we were forced by circumstance to move to a different state, the tree was well on its way to its fifty-foot height expectancy, and had assumed the iconic weeping willow shape, with a broad umbrella of limbs and branches draped with leafy stems cascading to the ground.

When we moved, I couldn’t bear to leave the tree behind. It was originally a gift to my wife, after all. So, I rooted a few cuttings and packed them into large pots, and wedged them into the back of the U-Haul. Now, two years later, one of those cuttings sits in front of me as I write this, a healthy but awkward spider of willow switches splayed in the sun on the deck of our second-floor apartment, waiting patiently for the day when it can cast a broad wispy shadow across some future backyard.

There is something strange in this. When I look at the tree in the pot on my deck, I can’t help but see it as the same tree that I planted twenty years ago. Not a piece or a part of the same tree, not a permutation or the generational offspring of the same tree, but the original tree itself. The tree that I chopped down and the tree that I planted in the back yard—the tree that likely still stands there—and the tree in the pot on my deck, despite the fact that they occupy different physical spaces and different—some overlapping—moments in time, are all one in the same organic manifestation, one in the same being, one in the same tree.

Such a thing seems ridiculous from an analytical perspective, from the perspective of clear-headed material objectivity that holds that the world is populated with independent entities and objects separated with borders and boundaries from other independent entities and objects. But I can’t shake the perception. It is too fundamental, too primal, too deeply rooted, as it were. And it is a perception, immediate and present, not an afterthought or a product of reflection, not something superadded after the fact. It is on par with, and as unshakable as, my experience of my arms as extensions of my own body. When I look at the tree in the pot, I see it in my mind’s eye extending across time and space in a way that fuses the multiple, historically separate plants into a single willow tree, one tree in multiple places, one tree emerging in memory as multiple forms, multiple faces of the same living being. 

This reminds me of something I read once about an indigenous perspective regarding animals, in which the deer killed today is the same deer that was killed yesterday—although they are unique, distinct, and separate occurrences, they are both identical manifestations of the same, unitary deer-being. My experience of the tree is something like that: a strong sense of a primal unity expressing itself in superficial multiplicity, a single tree-process stretching across time and space, capable of taking on a multitude of transient local forms.

Richard Katz, in the prologue to his book, Indigenous Healing Psychology, recounts a conversation he had with a Ju/’hoansi healer, his “friend and guide,” while doing field research in Botswana in 1968, when the Ju/’hoansi were still living as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Katz had brought a tape recorder to record their conversation, and was playing his collection of recordings of Ju/’hoansi healing dances for his guide, who was absolutely fascinated, and requested that the sounds be played over and over.

At some point, the healer remarked that the tape recorder was “something definitely powerful,” and said that he wished he knew how it works. Katz started to explain how the microphone picks up the sound, but his guide interrupted and said that he understood how the microphone works by collecting the sound and then sending it down the wire to the inside of the box, and then dismissed the microphone as a trivial thing, and said that he suspected that it wasn’t really the thing doing the hearing. It is obviously inside the box where the voices are being collected, he said, that’s where the real power is. And then he repeated that he wished he knew how it works.

When Katz started to tell him about energy and sound waves, his guide interrupted again, and said, “We already know those things. But what I really want to know is, how does it work?” Eventually Katz came to realize that he could not answer the question, that his own understanding was really only a superficial sketch of the process. His guide was disappointed, and said that “Whenever we’re given a thing of power by our ancestors—and surely this thing that captures our voices is powerful—we’re always told how it works and how to use it.”

A major difference between the Ju/’hoansi of the mid twentieth century and the inhabitants of civilization is that the latter have no idea about how anything really works—and even less of an idea about how any of it should be used. I’m looking at the cellphone sitting next to me right now. It is definitely a thing of power. And although I could give an extensive sketch of the basics of cellular networks and digital information processing and touchscreen circuitry, I really have no idea how any of it works or how it should be used, what greater purposes it should be applied to.

All things of power in civilization are like this, from cellphones and automobiles to global financial institutions and international trade agreements.  

This is the one area that those who want to argue that civilization is beneficial—and progressively so—consider to be the ace up their sleeve. Clearly innovation in medical technology reflects progress. Where would we be without polio vaccine or Prozac or dialysis? 

Let’s ignore for the moment the millions of people with medical problems that require technological intervention who will die because they do not have access to the technology, either because they are too poor or because they had the misfortune of being born on the wrong part of the planet—or both. We might start, instead, with the suffering that modern medical technology itself creates. We call specific instances of this suffering side effects as if they are not meaningful results of the technology’s application, and thus not to be given full weight in a cost-benefit analysis. Then add to that the fact that the number of people (with access) whose lives existing medical technology will be able to extend or improve does not begin to offset the suffering of people currently afflicted with medical conditions caused directly or indirectly by life in a physically and psychologically toxic industrial society. When you consider that the overwhelming majority of medical conditions that require treatment using advanced medicine are themselves direct or indirect results of our dependence on modern technology, the argument that medical technology is making things generally better dissolves entirely. 

Consider, as salient examples, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and most types of cancer. Before anyone suggests that modern technology does more good than harm, they need to first weigh the costs and benefits associated with advanced medical technology—taking care to include the hidden physical and mental health costs associated with the corporate industrial infrastructure that serves as a precondition for modern medical technology’s existence in the first place. You don’t get MRIs or potent antibiotics without a toxic environment and a crowded, stress-filled, nutritionally-deficient modern lifestyle.

The need for advanced medicine is a direct byproduct of the conditions that support its very existence. And the increase in need has always outpaced medical tech’s ability to keep up—antibiotic resistance being a clear case in point.