19971997
People :
Author : Bob Black
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Bashing the primitivist anarchists is probably Dean Bookchin’s highest priority (Anonymous 1996), because they are the excommunicate anarchists whose views are most likely to be confused with, and to compete successfully with, his own. He revels in his self-image as ecology’s apostle to the anarchists, and for once, there’s some truth to his messianic machismo. It was the Dean, after all, who has for so long and in so many books clamored for the restoration of “organic community,” as he now shamefacedly admits (41; cf. Bookchin 1974, 1982, 1987a, 1989, 1991). Once again his embarrassment is that his readers took him at his word — an error that this reader, for one, will not repeat. These innocents never suspected that they were not supposed to learn anything about primitive societies or pre-industrial communities except what cleared Bookchinist censorship.
The Dean is so much the “irate petty bourgeois” (52) on this subject that he lashes out at the primitivists in petty, peevish ways — even for him. Several sources John Zerzan cites in Future Primitive (1994), he huffs, are “entirely absent” from its bibliography, such as “‘Cohen (1974)’ and ‘Clark (1979)’” (62 n. 19). Zerzan cites “Cohen (1974),” not on any controversial point, but for the platitude that symbols are “essential for the development and maintenance of social order” (1994: 24) — does the Dean disagree? He never says so. “Clark (1979)” may be a misprint for “Clark (1977),” which does appear in Zerzan’s bibliography (1994: 173). As the author of a book from the same publisher, Autonomedia, in the same series, I know how sloppy the production values of this amateur, all-volunteer nonprofit collective can be. Additionally, Zerzan (1996: 1) in a letter to me admits to “faulty record-keeping” and explains that the absence of the two references the Dean carps about “goes back to switching to social science-type notes — after FE [the Fifth Estate] refused to run footnotes to my articles, in the ‘80s.”
The Dean refers to part 2, ch. 4, sec. 4 of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (64–65) although the book ends with part 2, ch. 3 (Stirner 1995: viii, 320–324). My library copy of Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Bookchin 1971) from Ramparts Press has a list of fifteen errata taped into it which presumably ought not to shatter the reader’s “faith in [Bookchin’s] research” (62 n. 19), and it is far from complete: that should be Jacques Ellul, for instance, not Jacques Elul (ibid.: 86). And that should be Alfred Zimmern, not Edward Zimmerman (ibid.: 159, 288 n. 27; cf. Zimmern 1931). Bookchin was perhaps thinking of a singer-songwriter who has interested him for decades, Bob Dylan (9), the Artist Formerly Known as Zimmerman. In an especially maladroit move, the Dean cites a favorable review of Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (1991) in the Whole Earth Review as verifying that Bey’s anarchism is a decadent, “unsavory” (20) “bourgeois form of anarchism” (22): the Whole Earth Review has, after all, a “yuppie clientele” (23). The back jacket blurbs for just one of the Dean’s books (1987) come from such arch-yuppie publications as the Village Voice and The Nation. The inside back jacket blurb boasts that he has contributed to “many journals” including CoEvolution Quarterly. CoEvolution Quarterly was the original name of the Whole Earth Review.
The Dean’s devotion to urbanism is an important part of his hatred of the primitive. City-statism and primitive society are mutually exclusive. What amazes is that the Dean assumes that it’s the primitivists, not the city-statists, who are the presumptive heretics from anarchism — that they, not he, have some explaining to do. There has never been an anarchist city, not for more than a few months at the most, but there have been many longlasting anarchist primitive societies. Many anarchists have considered anarchy possible in urban conditions — among them the Dean’s bete noir Hakim Bey (Black 1994: 106) — but Bookchin is the first anarchist who ever posited that anarchy is necessarily urban. That would have come as quite a surprise to the Makhnovist peasant guerrillas in the Ukraine or the insurrectionary anarchist villagers in the pueblos of Andalusia (Bookchin 1977: ch. 5). My point is not that the efforts and experiences of urban anarchists are irrelevant or unworthy of attention — after all, I’m an urban anarchist myself — only that they are not the only anarchist experiences worthy of attention. I fail to understand why anarchists should attend only to their failures and ignore their only successes.
I don’t consider myself a primitivist. Genuine anarcho- primitivists such as John Zerzan, George Bradford and Feral Faun probably don’t think I’m one of them either, any more than Hakim Bey is, although the Dean can’t quite figure out “is he is or is he ain’t” (62 n. 8). So it’s not my purpose to defend the views of John Zerzan or George Bradford against Bookchin (although, incidentally, I’ll do some of that): they are quite capable of defending themselves and I’m sure they will. Bradford, in fact, has written a lengthy rejoinder to be co-published by Autonomedia and Black & Red. But it is my purpose to show that in the way he denounces the primitivists, the Dean is, as usual, unscrupulous and malicious. When he isn’t flat-out wrong he’s usually irrelevant.
In rebutting a right-wing libertarian critic, I made clear two of the aspects of primitive societies (there are others) which ought to interest anarchists:
Hunter-gatherers inform our understanding and embarrass libertarians [and Bookchinists] in at least two ways. They operate the only known viable stateless societies. And they don’t, except in occasional emergencies, work in any sense I’ve used the word (Black 1992: 54).
Even the Dean earlier admitted the first point: “This organic, basically preliterate or ‘tribal,’ society was strikingly nondomineering” (1989: 47). After all, Cultural Man is at least two million years old. He was originally a hunter-gather. He was an anatomically modern human at least 50,000 years before he adopted any other mode of subsistence. As recently as 10,000 years ago he was still only a forager (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 3). And he was still an anarchist.
Now it may well be that the life-ways of hunter-gatherers (also known as foragers) are not, as a practical matter, available for immediate adoption by disgruntled urbanites, as the Dean declaims (36). Some primitivists have said as much; John Moore, for one, is exasperated to have to keep saying so (1996: 18). Others, in my opinion, have equivocated. But that’s not the point, or not the only point. A way of life is much more than a “life-style.” Hunter-gatherers grow up in a habitat and learn its secrets, they have “a marvelous understanding of the habitat in which they lived; they were, after all, highly intelligent and imaginative beings” (47), Most anarchists should probably send for a lot of Loompanics books and practice up on a lot of survival skills before they even think of venturing into the wilderness on a long-term basis. Hardly any anarcho-primitivists propose to do so (to my knowledge, only one). But the point is to learn from the primitives, not necessarily to ape them.
Dean Bookchin, in contrast, doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know anything about primitives which might suggest that low-tech, non-urban anarchy is even possible — although it’s the only kind of anarchy empirically proven to be possible. Since the whole point of the Dean’s polemic is to pass judgment upon what counts as anarchism, you’d think he’d try to indict primitives as statists. As that is impossible, he changes the subject.
Repeatedly, the Dean throws what he apparently considers roundhouse punches at primitivist myths, but he never connects, either because they are not tenets of primitivism or else because they are not myths.
For instance, the Dean argues at length that hunter- gatherers have been known to modify, and not merely adapt to, their habitats, notably by the use of fire (42–43). Anthropologists, and not only the ones the Dean cites, have known that for a long time. The Australian aborigines, the quintessential foragers, set fires for various purposes which transformed their landscape, usually to their advantage (Blainey 1976: ch. 5 [“A Burning Continent”]). Shifting cultivators, such as most of the Indians of eastern North America, also fired the brush with important ecological consequences, as even historians know (Morgan 1975: ch. 3). If any primitivist ever claimed otherwise, he is wrong, but the Dean does not cite when and where he did. John Zerzan, “the anticivilizational primitivist par excellence” (39), observes, without apparent disapproval, that humans have been using fire for almost two million years (1994: 22).
To take an ecological perspective means to hypothesize general interaction among all species and between each and all species and the inanimate environment. It implies dethroning humans as the lords of nature appointed by a Judeo-Christian divinity, certainly, but it doesn’t imply or presuppose that there was ever a time or a condition of society in which humans never acted upon the rest of nature but were only acted upon. Not even amoebas are that passive and quiescent (Bookchin 1989: 200).
Amazingly, Bookchin explicitly embraces the Hobbesian myth that the lives of primitive, pre-political people were nasty, brutish and short (46). For him as for Hobbes (Black 1986: 24), the purpose of the myth is to further a statist agenda.
“Our early ancestors,” he remarks with satisfaction, “were more likely scavengers than hunter-gatherers” (46). How disgusting! They ate animals which were already dead! Just as we do when we shop the meat section of a supermarket. (Perhaps there are no meat sections in Burlington supermarkets. Perhaps there are no supermarkets there, just food co-ops. Why do I find it hard to summon up an image of Bookchin putting in his four hours a month bagging groceries?) Bookchin probably picked up this tidbit from Zerzan (1994: 19). Regardless, our still-prehistoric, still-anarchic ancestors must have formed other tastes in food in becoming big game hunters (42).
And these our animalistic ancestors were unhealthy too, claims the Dean. The Neanderthals suffered high rates of degenerative bone disease and serious injury (46). There is considerable controversy whether the Neanderthals were among our ancestors. If your ancestors are from Europe or the Levant, possibly; otherwise, almost certainly not. Admittedly, our early ancestors were more likely to be eaten by leopards and hyenas than we are (46), but for contemporary foragers, predation is a minor cause of death (Dunn 1968: 224–225). On the other hand, our leading killers, cancer and heart disease, appear infrequently among them (ibid.: 224), and our thousands of occupational diseases never do. Hunter-gatherers have never been afflicted by asbestosis, black lung disease, Gulf War syndrome (as I write these words, the Pentagon is finally admitting there might be such a thing) or carpal tunnel syndrome. Band societies have very low population densities, and “viral and bacterial infections cannot generally persist among small human populations” (Knauft 1987: 98). Paleolithic foragers might suffer serious or fatal injuries, but one million of them were not killed by motor vehicles in just a hundred years.
According to the Dean, prehistoric mortality statistics are “appalling”: “about half died in childhood or before the age of twenty, and few lived beyond their fiftieth year” (46). Even taking these claims to be true, the aggregate figures, their vagueness aside, are highly misleading. Foraging peoples usually have a lot greater sensitivity to the carrying capacities of their habitats than techno-urbanites do. The ones who didn’t have paid the price. The ones who did, and do, adjust their populations by the means at their disposal. Delayed marriage, abortion, prolonged lactation, sexual taboos, even genital surgery are among the cultural practices by which foragers hold down their birthrates (Yengoyan 1968:1941). Low-tech does have its limitations. The condom, the diaphragm, the IUD and the Pill have not been available to hunter-gatherers. Foragers have often resorted to post-partum population control as well: in other words, to infanticide and senilicide (Dunn 1968: 225).
Especially infanticide (although I suspect the Dean feels a lot more threatened by senilicide). Infanticide was probably prevalent among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers (Birdsell 1968: 236), so it’s ridiculous to calculate an “average” lifespan in which the few minutes or hours some neonates were allowed to live count for as much as all the years lived by those who actually go on to have lives. It’s as if in measuring the present-day American lifespan we included in the numerator, as 0, every conception averted by contraception and every aborted fetus, while adding each of them, scored as 1, to the denominator counting the entire population. We’d come up with a startlingly low “average” lifespan for the contemporary United States — 10 years? 20 years? — which would be utterly meaningless. When contraceptive devices became available to Nunamiut Eskimo women in 1964, there was “massive adoption” of them (Binford & Chasko 1976: 77). At this point somebody might rise up in righteous indignation — from the right, from the left, a trifling distinction — to denounce my equation of contraception, abortion and infanticide. I’m not even slightly interested in whether, or where, the Pope or any other dope draws moral lines among these time-honored practices. I don’t equate them morally because I’m not moralizing. I equate them only with respect to the issue, the demographic issue, at hand.
Gimmickry aside, the evidence suggests that foragers live relatively long lives. The Dean’s claim that the average lifespan of the !Kung San is 30 years (45) is unreferenced and misleading, Lee’s censuses showed
...a substantial proportion of people over the age of 60. This high proportion (8.7 to 10.7 percent) by Third World standards contradicts the widely held notion that life in hunting and gathering societies is “nasty, brutish, and short.” The argument has been made that life in these societies is so hard that people die at an early age. The Dobe area [of Botswana], by contrast, had dozens of active older persons in the population (Lee 1979: 44).
The population structure “looks like that of a developed country, for example, like that of the United States around 1900” (ibid.; 47). This is how two other anthropologists summarize the !Kung situation:
Although individuals who have reached maturity can expect to live into their middle 50s, life expectancy at birth is approximately 32 years, determined mainly by high infant mortality — between 10 and 20% in the first year, almost all due to infectious disease. In the traditional situation, infanticide made a small additional contribution to mortality (Konner & Shostack 1987: 12).
It is true that foragers have always lacked the technology to perpetuate the agony of their incapacitated elders as our insurance-driven system arranges for some of ours. When I visit my father in the nursing home — a stroke victim, a mentally confused cripple usually complaining of pain, 85 years old — I find it hard to consider longevity an absolute value. According to the Iliad, neither did Achilles:
For my mother Thetis, the goddess of the silver feet tells me I carry two sorts of destiny towards the day of my death. Either if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; or if I return to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life (quoted in Feyerabend 1987: 138).
For an urbanist (if less than urbane) crusader like the Dean, the relevant comparisons should be different. Primitivists like Zerzan and Bradford compare the robust lives of Paleolithic foragers with the stunted lives of those caught up in the urban/agricultural complex: “The increasingly sophisticated interpretation of the archaeological record suggests that the transition to the Neolithic was accompanied by a fairly general decline in dietary quality, evidenced in stature and decreased longevity” (Ross 1987: 12). And also a related decline in health. Almost all archaeological studies “conclude that infection was a more serious problem for farmers than for their hunting and gathering forebears, and most suggest that this resulted from increased sedentism, larger population aggregates, and/or the well-established synergism between infection and malnutrition” (Cohen 1987: 269–270). For one thing, work — and when we arrive at agriculture we arrive, unambiguously, at work — is hazardous to your health.
The fact that these are the findings of archaeological studies of prehistoric societies renders irrelevant, for present purposes, the recent argument that the much-studied San are really just an impoverished underclass within capitalism (Wilmsen 1989). This is a controversial claim (Peters 1990) — vigorously rebutted by Richard B. Lee and like-minded anthropologists (Solway & Lee 1990) — which, predictably, Bookchin whoops up with uncritical abandon (44–45). But by definition, prehistoric peoples cannot have been marginal to, or relics of, or devolved from historical societies. What did they devolve from? Atlantis? Lemuria? Mu? Are they the love-children of extraterrestrials (“Earth girls are easy”) who, having had their exotic fun, revved up the Chariots of the Gods and rocketed off to the next off-planet pick-up scene? The artist Goya, as quoted by the Dean, once said that “the sleep of reason begets monsters” (28). Does Bookchin think that the sleeping-around of monsters begets reasonables?
And when we progress from mere agriculture to urbanism — one thing leads to another — health deteriorates even more dramatically. Throughout history, pre-industrial urban populations have usually reproduced at less than replacement levels: “Ancient cities were like tar pits, drawing country folk into their alluring but disease-ridden precincts” (Boyd & Richerson 1993: 127). The Dean is fond of the slogan that “city air makes you free” (1974: 1), but there is considerably more truth to saying that city air makes you sick (ibid.: 66). Urban “internal nonviability” has three sources: (1) high population density “facilitates the genesis and communication of infectious diseases”; (2) such cities “have almost invariably had poor sanitation and hygiene, particularly with respect to water and sewage”; and (3) urbanites depend on outside sources of food, on monocultural food production subject to crop failures and difficulties of transportation, storage and distribution (Knauft 1987: 98).
Industrial cities have only imperfectly coped with these unhealthy influences. They are more overcrowded than ever, with, the Dean has shown, adverse health consequences (Herber 1965). “Urban air is seriously polluted and urban wastes are reaching unmanageable proportions” — furthermore:
Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and garbage that gathers in its streets, the noise and massive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its population toward civic issues, and the ghastly indifference of the individual toward the physical violence that is publicly inflicted on other members of the community (Bookchin 1974:66,67).
Even the most conspicuous health accomplishment of industrialism, the control of disease by antibiotics, is being rolled back, as resistant strains of disease vectors evolve. Even the food situation is unsatisfactory, if not for precisely the traditional reasons. Most American urbanites have unhealthy diets, and more than a few are malnourished.
The Dean mostly obsesses about details — why not oblige him? — such as whether contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are “pristine” and whether hunter-gatherers have invariably been the benign stewards of their habitats. Although these propositions are largely irrelevant to the species “primitivism” and entirely irrelevant to its supposed genus, “lifestyle anarchism,” the ways the Dean deploys them are relevant to his ulterior aims and exemplary of his unsavory methods.
By “pristine” (44, 45) the Dean seems to mean the supposition that all contemporary hunter-gatherers are living fossils who have always lived the way they do now. As usual, when the Dean puts a loaded word in quotation marks it’s a dead giveaway that he’s not quoting anybody, just talking to his favorite person, himself. (Just as his mockery of primitive “reverence for life” (42) might have been amusing — a Bookchin first — if he could only have pinned on the anarcho-primitivists a phrase employed, not by them, but by that celebrated racist paternalist, the late B’wana, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.) He might have learned that — he probably did — from John Zerzan: “surviving hunter-gatherers, who have somehow managed to evade civilization’s tremendous pressures to turn them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political subjects, wage laborers), have all been influenced by contact with outside peoples” (1994: 29–30). The call for papers for the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference — which the Dean blames for romanticizing foragers (37) — stated “that there is no assumption that living hunter-gatherers are somehow living relicts of the Pleistocene” (quoted in Binford 1968: 274). Bookchin is beating a dead horse or, better yet, an extinct eohippus: “It is widely recognized that modern hunters are not pristine living relics of the Pleistocene” (Hawkes 1987: 350).
The Dean cites with some satisfaction a fairly recent article by William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492” (1992), but for several reasons, I doubt the Dean has even read it. In the first place, the Dean only adverts to it as “cited in William K. Stevens, ‘An Eden in Ancient America? Not Really,’ The New York Times (March 30, 1993, p. CI” (63 n. 22). The newspaper story may well have been how the Dean got wind of the article — nothing wrong with that, I often follow up on tips that way — but having served that purpose, there’s no reason to refer to a newspaper story which, at best, must have oversimplified the article. Second, the Dean misquotes the name of the journal. And finally, the title of the newspaper story, suggesting a debunking of the myth of “an Eden in ancient America,” has absolutely nothing to do with what Denevan was really writing about, although it has everything to do with the Dean’s anti-primitivist ideological agenda.
Denevan’s argument, which relates only to the Western Hemisphere, is that when Europeans arrived in the New World, and for some time afterwards, the landscape they encountered — Denevan is a cultural geographer — was not “pristine” if this means it had been barely affected by tens of thousands of years of indigenous human presence. Indian hunting, horticulture, and especially the use of fire had wrought important transformations in many stretches of the landscape. Many North American grasslands, for instance, were produced by human action, and to a lesser extent, so were the park-like woodlands of eastern North America (Morgan 1975: ch. 3; Salisbury 1982: ch. 1). But by the time the Euro-Americans moved west on a large scale, the once-numerous Indians had been decimated and much of the landscape had reverted to a tangled, pre-humanized “wilderness” the settlers mistook for pristine conditions. Denevan plausibly argues for this conclusion but does not, as the Dean does, consider it cause for celebration.
But what does this have to do with anything? A humanized landscape is not necessarily a ravaged, depleted, denaturalized landscape because there was a time when humans were natural.
The Dean, Professor of Social Ecology, also supposes he is saying something important when he avers that primitives may have contributed to the extinction of some species of the animals they hunted and that they may have sometimes degraded their environments (42–43). As the allegations are independent, let us address each count of the indictment separately.
Even the Dean admits that the best-known claim for induced extinction, so-called Pleistocene overkill, is “hotly debated” (63 n. 23). Rapid climatic change was indisputably part of the cause, and possibly a sufficient cause, for the extinction of overspecialized species like the mastodon. But supposing that prehistoric hunters were responsible for some extinctions — so what? Extinction has so far been the fate of almost every species to appear on this planet, and may in time be the fate of all of them. The continuation of natural life does not depend upon the continuation of any particular species, including ours. What difference does it make?
Anyway, to say that some prehistoric primitives could and did kill game animals on a large scale (42, 62–63 n. 20), as all anthropologists are well aware, does not entail that these primitives brought about the extinction of their prey. Well into historic times, the Plains Indians killed many buffalo and the Northwest Coast Indians netted many salmon without coming close to extinguishing either species. The yield, though enormous, was sustainable. It required the intrusion of industrial society to pose a real risk of extinction with its high-tech, mass-production life destruction.
An article which the Dean cites (Legge & Rowley-Conwy 1987), but must not have read very carefully — even if we disregard his mistake as to one coauthor’s name (62–63 n. 20 [“Rowly”]) — actually tells against his indictment of the foragers. Bookchin cites it for the conclusion “that migrating animals could have been slaughtered with devastating effectiveness by the use of corrals” (63 n. 20). Granting that — a point of no present importance — the article tells a more interesting story. The authors, archaeologists, are reporting on a site they excavated in Syria. It was first occupied by hunter-gatherers in approximately 9000 B.C. and remained occupied, with one break, well into the Neolithic (agricultural) period. The authors emphasize that this was a year-round community, not a seasonal campsite. For about a thousand years after the villagers domesticated plants, hunting — mainly gazelle hunting — continued to supply them with animal protein. By then, the authors believe, the farmers had hunted the gazelles into extinction, and only then did they take up animal husbandry to replace the meat formerly supplied by wild game.
There are two points of interest here, and each is adverse to the Dean. Hunter-gatherers were not responsible for the extinction of the gazelles: their agricultural descendants were. These villagers had long since ceased to be foragers by the time they finished off the gazelles (locally, that is: the animals survived elsewhere). More important, they’d never really been hunter-gatherers in the sense in which hunter- gatherers interest primitivists and ought to interest all anarchists.
Anthropologists have recently resolved an ambiguity in the expression “hunter-gatherers” (cf. Murdock 1968: 13–15). It refers to two kinds of society, not one: nonsedentary and sedentary. What they have in common is that they hunt and/or gather rather than plant/and or herd. They do not domesticate either plants or animals (in a few such societies, dogs are domesticated, but not as a food source). What separates them is whether they occupy locations on a long-term or short-term basis. The occupants of the Syrian site were always “hunters” in the obvious respect that, like many members of the National Rifle Association, they hunted animals. But they more closely resembled such Northwest Coast Indians as the Kwakiutl in that they were the permanent, year-round occupants of favored, restricted locations which afforded them sustenance. They were not the same sort of “hunter-gatherers” as the Australian aborigines, the San/Bushmen, the Pygmies, the Great Basin Shoshone and many others for whom frequent relocation was the condition of successful adaptation to their habitats. Sedentary hunter-gatherers are socially much more like sedentary agriculturists and urbanites than they are like foragers who are routinely on the move. Their societies exhibit class stratification, hereditary chiefs, sometimes even slavery (Kelly 1991; Renouf 1991: 90–91, 98, 101 n. 1; cf. Renouf 1989 for a prehistoric European example). It is from these societies that the city and the state emerged — together.
Possibly more relevant is the claim that primitives are not necessarily “ecologically benign” (42), and there’s no reason to suppose they always are. As Denevan says, sometimes “Indians lived in harmony with nature with sustainable systems of resource management” and sometimes they didn’t (1992: 370). But Devevan was not generalizing about primitives, he was generalizing about Indians. He nowhere adduces a single example of Amerindian hunter-gatherers who degraded their environment, and neither does Bookchin, although I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep if it turned out that there was one, or even more than one group like that. A small-scale society which fouled its own nest would probably not survive, but the environmental damage it did would be localized. A small-scale society which by some combination of insight and accident settled into a sustainable relationship with its ecosystem would be much more likely to persist. Existing foraging societies may not all have been around for millennia, but they’ve endured at least for centuries.
“Primitivism” is not “indigenism,” i.e., pan-Indian racial nationalism with a left-wing spin such as Ward Churchill serves up. “Primitive” and “Indian” are not synonyms. Most primitives were never Indians and many pre-Columbian Indians weren’t primitives. The Dean reports that “forest overclearing and the failure of subsistence agriculture undermined Mayan society and contributed to its collapse” (43). One only has to refer to his own footnote to identify his references (64 n. 25) from “The Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations to The Collapse of Complex Societies in order to notice that he’s not referring to foragers or primitives, he’s referring to a civilization, the state-organized, urban-based, agricultural, priest-ridden, class-stratified Mayan civilization. Civilizations have a long history of occasioning environmental destruction whether the civilized be red, white, black or yellow: they have belonged to all of these races. Is this news to Professor Social Ecology?
Probably the most amusing aspect of the Dean’s campaign against the primitivists is how blatantly self-contradictory it is (Jarach 1996). While he wants to represent primitive life-ways as undesirable, the decisive point is that they are, for us, simply impossible: “Anyone who advises us to significantly, even drastically, reduce our technology is also advising us, in all logic, to go back to the ‘stone age’ — at least to the Neolithic or Paleolithic (early, middle, or late)” (36).
To digress for just a bit, consider how idiotic this assertion is. The Dean says that any significant rollback of technology would reduce us to, at best, the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. But obviously there was a lot of technological progress, if that’s what it was, between the Neolithic Revolution (agriculture) which commenced a few thousand years ago and the Megamachine which dominates us now. The Dean’s beloved Athenian polis, for instance, exploited a technology much inferior to what we moderns command but far beyond what the Neolithic farmers, the earliest farmers, had to work with. Early medieval Europe, an almost entirely rural society, quickly developed new technology (such as the mold-board plow) beyond anything that urban-oriented Greco-Roman civilization ever did.
John Zerzan’s unspeakable heresy, as the Dean sees it, is that Zerzan thinks that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not just fail to “innovate technological change” (38), they refused domestication and the division of labor. For the Dean, progress is an offer you can’t refuse. But then, sublimely oblivious to the inconsistency, he goes on to say that some primitive societies have, in his value-laden word, “devolved” from more complex societies (44). The Mayans devolved from civilization (43). The Yuqui foragers of the Bolivian forest devolved from “a slave-holding pre-Columbian society” which was horticultural (45). Even the San have “literally devolved — probably very much against their desires — from horticultural social systems” (44; cf. Wilmsen 1989).
We may “never have any way of knowing whether the lifeways of today’s foraging cultures accurately mirror those of our ancestral past” (43) — actually, archaeology and paleoecology have come up with some ways — but we have an easy way to find out if the San would rather be gardeners than foragers. We can ask them. This would never occur to the Dean, for whom contemporary foragers are little more than talking dogs, but it occurred to Richard B. Lee when he lived with and studied the San in the ‘60s: “when a Bushman was asked why he hadn’t taken to agriculture he replied: ‘Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”’ (Lee 1968: 33).
There are many examples of voluntary “devolution.” The ancestors of most Plains Indian tribes were agriculturists. There is absolutely no reason to suppose they were forced off their farmlands and onto the plains by environmental pressures or aggression from other tribes. When the horse, introduced by the Spanish, found its way north, these Indians seized upon this new technology to “devolve” from sedentary agriculture to nomadic buffalo hunting. We’ll never know for sure why they made this choice. Was buffalo meat tastier than corn? Was hunting more fun than farming? Was a frequent change of scenery more interesting than being stuck forever in Mudville-on-the-Missouri? Whatever it was, it was a choice. Maybe we have a choice too.
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