by Jason Godesky
Willem Larsen and Urban Scout have put together an amazing, thorough, and much-needed introduction to “E-Primitive.” Larsen’s explorations of animist language and oral tradition at the College of Mythic Cartography have contributed greatly to the growing rewilding movement, and this work summarizes much of that work in a single piece. We at the Tribe of Anthropik feel proud to present this work, cross-posted from Urban Scout and the College of Mythic Cartography. We don’t necessarily agree with all the details, but that hardly matters next to the importance of the main point, with which we could hardly agree more. This article greatly inspired us, and we hope it will inspire you, too.
by Jason Godesky
I think most prospective rewilders can share my dilemma. We hear about the fabulous adventures of those successful trackers, educators and idols of our movement who’ve found some way to dedicate themselves, full-time, to their passion, usually thanks, at least in part, to a supportive and understanding community (often their own family) who have the means and the will to support those endeavors. Good for them, and we all owe the people who support them a measure of gratitude for giving us those motivating, inspirational icons, but it makes for a model few of us can really emulate. Perhaps our families don’t really understand what we hope and wish for (and given the massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda invested into discouraging such pursuits, we can hardly blame them), or perhaps they simply don’t have the capacity to support our endeavors, as unlikely as they seem to ever net any economic benefit that our society would recognize. We do not have the skills, nor the community support of any kind of tribe, to rely on our earth skills for shelter and sustenance; if we tried to shelter ourselves and feed ourselves with what we know now, we’d only ensure our death, whether by starvation, thirst or exposure.
by Jason Godesky
Yes, this has taken significantly longer than The Economist needed for “Noble or Savage?,” but really digging into the evidence usually does take longer than a superficial analysis, bald assertion, or an assemblage of half-truths. As before, I haven’t written anything original in response to this article, since it doesn’t present anything new—everything here quotes articles you’ve seen here, answering these claims, over the past two, sometimes even three, years.
The Myth of Progress
“Noble or Savage?,” The Economist,” 19 December 2007:
by Jason Godesky
I have already had a few commenters direct me to “Noble or Savage?,” the article from the Dec. 19 Economist magazine. The article has not raised my low opinion of this periodical. As Kenneth Boulding so correctly assessed, “Anyone who believes that growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” You may recall that The Economist teamed up with Shell some years back gave us the absurdist essay contest question, “Do we need nature?” (Derrick Jensen gave perhaps the best answer: “It’s insane.”) But this most recent offering presents precisely the kind of article I have, unfortunately, become all too familiar with—overblown rhetoric based in faulty evidence presented deceptively. Nothing new appears in the article that we haven’t spent pages debunking here in past articles, but we can hardly expect casual readers to have read that much of the Anthropik backlog. Since I have no doubt that many will continue to post links to this inane article mistaking its argument for a cogent one, I offer this piece. It has little new for regular readers; instead, I have simply collated my previous responses to the evidence misrepresented by The Economist article, so that it appears all in one place.
by Jason Godesky
I’ve been a fool. For a long time, I’ve been advocating for a holistic sense of rewilding; changing culture, rather than simply focusing on primitive skills, and rewilding rather than resisting. Fortunately, a small, brave cadre of commenters have shown me the error of my ways, and how projects like the Fifth World, or Giuli’s Fabulous Forager, fundamentally betray primitivism. They’re absolutely right; this is nothing more than an excuse to cling to our old, civilized addictions. We can’t suffer that kind of impurity, and with that in mind, to try to rectify for my past wrongs, I’ve come up with some lists to give up others like myself, in the hopes that those brave souls who so helped me, might also be able to help them.
by Jason Godesky
To call a movement “reactionary” carries denotations of backwards, repressive ideas. It first found usage in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in reference to those who supported the monarchical Ancien Régime. But all reactionary movements share a fundamental problem in their predisposition towards overcorrection. Who could argue that the “Age of Faith” had not created terrible problems—and “problems” puts it mildly. Yet the Enlightenment fell to the same proclivity. It did not merely assert the importance of logic and critical thought; Enlightenment writers posited Science as the best, or even the only, way of knowing. Today, much of primitivism suffers from an equal and opposite reactionary movement, as the Romantic movement did in an earlier reaction to the Enlightenment. At the risk of falling prey to that same trend, this provides an opportunity to make an important counter-point: why we need critical thought.
by Jason Godesky
For most domesticated people, the suggestion of civilization’s fundamental unsustainability seems as preposterous as trying to disprove gravity. All of recorded history falls under the heading of civilization, and besides, have we not seen its spectacular growth and progress, even in our own lifetimes? How could we possibly call something like that unsustainable? Of course, a closer look at that history reveals a very different pattern; not the 10,000 year tale of progress we’ve normally heard, but a desperate 10,000 year race to stay ahead of the consequences of our own, unsustainable way of life. Western civilization seems particularly apt, because we descend from the people who went west, and ever since then, west has always seemed pregnant with hope and opportunity. “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” as the famous quote misattributed to Horace Greeley admonished as late as the nineteenth century. A simple ecological fact created that attitude. As Derrick Jensen put it, “Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.” Only in the West could we find land that we hadn’t killed off yet.
by Jason Godesky
The word civilization comes from the Latin civis, meaning “city.” This curious epiphenomenon of civilization gives us as good a definition for civilization as we could ask for; etymologically and anthropologically, “civilization” means a culture of cities. Civilizations certainly count as complex societies, but we can imagine other kinds of complex societies which, whether or not they prove tenable in reality, would still fail to meet the criteria of civilization, chiefly because they would also lack cities, and all that goes with them. So what do we mean by a “city,” and what makes it so uniquely unsustainable?
by Jason Godesky
I know I should probably keep this in store for when the Fifth World blog gets started up, but I’m wondering if anyone else who’s read “The Fifth World Manifesto” finds Ryan Dancey’s latest articles at all familiar.
Thoughts? Comments?
Permanent link to this post (77 words, estimated 18 seconds reading time)
by Jason Godesky
The safest generalization one can make about life on earth might describe it as a thin layer of green rust. Much further below the surface of the earth, and even bacteria finds existence made difficult; too high in the atmosphere, and they again become thin. Bacteria represent the oldest form of life, and the most prevalent, but when it comes to multi-cellular life, plants form the bulk of it on this planet. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis deals largely in the global community of plants, and how they cooperate and share with one another. The entire animal kingdom exists as a kind of auxiliary to the world of plants; laid on top of it, and completely dependent on it. Yet all too often, we turn a blind eye to the secret life of plants, and mistake them for passive, inanimate parts of the scenery.
