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THE FOUR STAGES OF HUMANITY

Stage one – Wild (Authentic) Human: Humans, as unique individuals in intimate relationship with other unique individuals, creatively accommodating the demands and opportunities of the natural and social environments they inhabit.

Stage two – Domesticated Human: Humans as a conquering and colonizing labor force organized according to hierarchically structured power relations and applied in ways specifically designed to propagate and intensify the power structures themselves.

Stage three – Mechanized Human: Humans as standardized and disposable servomechanisms in an intensely violent globally-expansive geopolitical machine.  

Stage four – Nutritive Human: Culturally and psychologically homogenized humans as a digestible source of economic energy to fuel an insatiable planet-consuming leviathan.

It’s probably time we clear the air of a few things.

First, if you only pay attention to the ridiculous political theater in the brazenly commercialized popular media, then you might not realize that we are deep into a planet-wide crisis of unprecedented magnitude and scope. It is not hyperbole to say that we are completely fucked. In fact, to say that we are completely fucked is a gross understatement.

Global warming isn’t just a series of news-worthy weather events or an excuse to buy an electric car. The largest mass extinction in 66 million years isn’t just a fun fact to share on social media. The irradiating of the oceans and atmosphere doesn’t just mean it’s probably time to upgrade those old rusty nuclear power plants. The industrial sterilization of land and the chemical toxification of rivers aren’t just the temporary price of progress. Overlapping zoonotic pandemics are not just a natural side effect of our biological vulnerability to disease.

These things are all part and parcel of the same mounting and overwhelming and unstoppable catastrophe, a catastrophe that is an unavoidable consequence of how we are being forced to live, a crisis that is synonymous with modern global industrial civilization. To deny this basic truth is the delusional equivalent of believing the Earth is flat and the global economy is under the control of a secret cabal of alien lizards. 

Second, despite self-promotional corporate hype and mollifying government propaganda, innovations in science and technology won’t save us from the intensifying crisis. Science and technology are the proximal source of the problem to begin with. Science and technology are directly responsible for climate change. Their collective results have been sending two hundred unique species into extinction each day. They are the reason the oceans and atmosphere are radioactive. The industrial processes they make possible are precisely the ones toxifying the rivers and sterilizing the land. There is no convincing evidence, historical or otherwise, that science and technology can do anything other than make things even worse than they are. And it is absurd to think that the cure is to just add more of the poison that is making us sick.   

Third, if you are seeking a cure, if you are looking for a solution that allows civilization to continue intact, prepare to be disappointed because you aren’t going to find one. The most uncomfortable truth of all is that there is no solution to the catastrophe of civilization. The thoughtforms lurking behind the search for solutions are the very ones responsible for the perpetuation and intensification of the crisis.

This leaves us with a single burning question, the only question that really matters: What do we do about it?

A noose made of silk is still a noose.

If a person asked you for $100 so that she could buy a gun to kill someone and you gave her the money—with full knowledge of her intentions—you would be an accomplice to murder.

If instead of asking you for $100, she asked you for $50 and got the other $50 from someone else, you are just as much an accomplice to murder—providing only half the money doesn’t make you only half an accomplice any more than it is possible to kill only half a person.

What if instead of asking two people for money to buy her gun, she asks several million people; and instead of one gun, she buys the largest arsenal of lethal weapons on the planet; and instead of killing one person, she kills hundreds of thousands over the course of a few decades; and instead of a person, she is the US Government?

Each year multiple thousands of people are being killed with weapons our tax dollars have purchased. But the fact that the collection of taxes is coerced and nonoptional provides us with moral cover, along with a comforting illusion of blamelessness. 

It is sometimes good to remind yourself that the most important thing that happened today is another 150-200 species just went extinct.

What if corporations were actual living beings?

What if they could bleed, what if they could feel grief and insecurity, what if they could truly experience all of the kinds of physical and psychological pain and suffering that they have inflicted on real people and the living world?

What if corporate-owned properties were in reality the exposed appendages of vulnerable physical bodies? What if broken windows and burned delivery vans and shattered computer monitors and severed power lines hurt? What if cyberattacks and blocked shipments and vandalized warehouses and crippled communication conduits caused them to feel real frustration? What if defacement of corporate logos on a billboards and signs caused them to feel genuine humiliation?

How long would it take before we could make their corporate lives so miserable that they begged to be euthanized? How long before they committed corporate suicide?

Corporations are not living beings, of course. But what if we actually treated them that way?

A caller on Anarchy Radio last week mentioned something about some folks on the progressive liberal left calling the green anarchist/anarcho-primitivist view a perspective coming from privilege.

I have heard this accusation before leveled against anarchists in general, and it irritates me because there is a kernel—maybe a bit more than just a kernel—of truth to it. If you look at the demographic breakdown, the folks who call themselves anarchists or primitivists (and perhaps to a lesser extent the folks who call themselves green anarchists) are, statistically speaking, overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.

However, those hurling the privilege accusation don’t seem to realize that that very fact actually makes the anarchist point.

I am a white male. And my white male privilege means that I have a degree of freedom of expression and affiliation, and the opportunities to explore and choose my politics, that a person of color or a woman or a trans person might not have. I’m more likely to be listened to and less likely to suffer any serious repercussions when I speak my mind.

I’m a white male, and I’m an anarchist: what are you going to do about it?

If I was a person of color, or a woman, or trans—or god forbid all three!—I would have far more immediate and pressing concerns to deal with related to racism or sexism or transphobia. And the burden of racism or sexism or transphobia would make it less likely that I would want to make myself even more of a target by calling myself an anarchist.

The very existence of my white male privilege makes the anarchist point exactly. As an anarchist, I’m saying that there shouldn’t be privilege of any kind. Inequities based on race or sex or sexual orientation or gender identification are systemic, they are baked into the system, a system that is based on exploitation and oppression, a system that requires social inequality—inequities in power and the unequal distribution of access to resources are the fuel that drives the consumer capitalist machine.

And as a primitivist, I’m saying that once you remove inequities in power and access, the system will grind to a halt, and people—people of every kind—will be free to live authentically human lives.  

Addressing the leaked upcoming Supreme Court ruling on abortion at a news conference a few days ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said:

In recent years republican legislators have been racing to pass extreme anti-choice legislation that would send women’s rights back into the Stone Age.

That’s actually a great idea! In fact, I can’t think of a better solution to the abortion rights issue.

Up until the very end of the period known as the “Stone Age,” all humans on the planet were living as small band hunter gatherers, an overwhelmingly egalitarian lifestyle. The very idea that a woman could lose her right to choose what happens to her own body would have been inconceivable.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the notion that people have “rights” was inconceivable. The idea of rights only makes sense after the social world has been embedded within hierarchies of power and oppression. What would it mean to say that I have a “right” to choose to do a thing when there is no one around with any legitimate authority either to force me to do it or to prevent me from doing it?

And when it comes to “reproductive rights,” women living in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies typically have more or less complete bodily autonomy, and can choose to end a pregnancy at any time up to (and even immediately after!) birth. No questions asked.

Seriously, Chuck, we really should send women’s (and everyone’s) rights back into the Stone Age!

Given the point he was obviously trying to make, Schumer’s choice of “Stone Age” was off by a minimum of ten thousand years. In reality, Republican legislators only want to send women’s rights back to the 19^th century, back to a time when women didn’t have much in the way of any rights at all.

A western redcedar stands barely six feet outside my second-floor office window, its trunk denuded of branches on the side facing the building. It presents a lonely and spindly presence, forced to accommodate a site far removed from its preferred forest habitat.

Despite its name, it is not really a cedar, but a member of the cypress family, and an entirely different genus from the true cedars found to the north and east of the Mediterranean, the trees of the mythical forest that blanketed the lands around ancient Sumer, the forest that was home to the monster Humbaba in the tale of Gilgamesh.

Like its namesake in the Lavant, however, the cedar outside my window is an intensely social tree, with a strong inclination to congregate in clusters with others of its kind, its roots intertwined with its neighbors and its branches collecting with theirs into a tall, gloom-casting canopy over a thick floor of fragrant brown sprays where little else grows, a rarified space surrounded by a gradually increasing population of squat, shade-adapted understory plants, forming a dimly lit cathedral where all the furniture has been piled into the periphery.

Along the ground below my window the transition zone between building and tree is the antithesis of a cathedral, bright and narrow and cluttered, a flat, thinly mulched space dotted with “ornamental” plants (ornamental being horticulture-speak for plants indigenous to someplace else, or plants that have been modified through selective breeding into something barely resembling their indigenous forms, or both of these). The mulched space ends abruptly a few short feet from the cedar’s trunk, and becomes first a heavily weathered concrete curb bespeckled with chipped yellow caution paint, and then a curved lane of asphalt connecting two parking areas. 

The view through the window, through the just barely discernible ultraviolet tinting of the glass and across six feet of visually unoccupied airspace to the curling coils of peeling bark on the branchless side of the trunk, is not entirely transparent, with reflected echoes of nearby objects in the room around me. And there is something about the nearness of the tree and the faint reflection of the office interior that renders the above-ground transition on my side of the window intolerably immediate.

This midair transition zone is easily dismissed as trivial. What is there of importance that could flourish in the emptiness between the upper regions of terrestrially-rooted objects? But the space between the window and the tree is not empty; for all of its airiness, it is nonetheless alive with potential, a space of communication and transit and a venue for activities of immensity and necessity. It is a space filled with flying and floating and drifting things. It is a world of birds. It is a world of spider silk. It is a world of tiny winged creatures who dance in and out of the tree’s shadow. It is a conduit for wind-blown seeds and pollen, a channel for the transmission of pheromones and gasses, a medium for countless unseen signs and signals.        

The zone is reduced to a strictly visual world from my insulated perspective. All external sounds are muffled by the building’s exterior wall, and the tangy astringent fragrance of cedar is blocked entirely. Everything on my side of the glass is calm and still in both their solid and reflected forms. But the cedar and the branches of a more distant oak and the tops of trees beyond them are in perpetual and unpredictable motion on this particularly cold and breezy spring afternoon.

The transition is as much psychological as it is physical, as much active mental presentation as passive sensory experience. The physical separation between inside and outside makes the world through the glass into a virtual world, a world experienced in real-time but semi-vicariously, a world in which I am not a wholly engaged participant, a world I can fully inhabit only through imaginative projection, through my body’s memory of bitter spring breezes upon the skin of previous versions of me.

Yet even for the me who is present now, the ephemeral space between the glass and the cedar is a crowded place. There are things in my memory that find this space particularly abundant, despite its apparent emptiness—because of its apparent emptiness. It is a field of affordances, a chasm that begs to be traversed, a threshold that beckons. My eyes reach through the window and grasp hold of what my hands cannot.

And in a similar way, with what I write here, my thoughts reach out, refracted into the shape of words that collect in stacked rows across the screen in front of me, toward a world in which words on screens and office windows—and buildings next to cedar trees—are entirely unnecessary.  

The term comes from Iris Murdoch, a twentieth century British novelist and moral philosopher. But I suspect the concept is an ancient one that has likely been around since the earliest humans first began to dabble in concepts.

For Murdoch, unselfing is a feature of the experience of beauty. It can occur when in the presence of great art. But it also occurs in the presence of the natural world. To look up and see a bird outside the window can be enough to temporarily yank us outside of what has become our default mode of thought, our ruminating self-absorption.

Echoes of Zen philosophy in this, perhaps.

Unselfing, she claims, has moral implications: to make unselfing a more frequent feature of your posture to the world is to become a more virtuous person—in the Hellenistic, rather than the Buddhistic, sense of virtue; Murdoch was apparently a big fan of Plato and his crowd.

As I want to understand the term, unselfing is distinctly different from empathy. To be empathetic is to feel along with the other, to suffer in your own person a measure of what the other suffers. But this empathetic suffering-for-the-other can, paradoxically, involve an intensification and amplification of the self: the other imagined into the self, incorporated as part of your present self-experience. The pain you feel, real or imagined, can never belong to anyone but yourself. Despite platitudes to the contrary, pain is not something that can be shared.

Unselfing has perhaps more to do with the psychological idea of flow than with empathy. As with flow, unselfing involves an immersive state of attentional focus linked with the momentary disintegration of self-awareness. Murdoch seems to suggest this connection between flow and unselfing, pointing out how immediately following an unselfing experience, the anxieties and concerns we were wrapped up in just moments before are no longer as compelling as they were, a clear parallel to the cathartic state of calmness a person can experience when emerging from a protracted period of flow.

But it’s the potential ethical and moral implications of unselfing that I find most interesting. That, and the strong suspicion I have that unselfing—like flow—was at one time a much more commonplace experience, that unselfing is yet another human rule that civilized life has rendered an exception.