A short and briefly annotated list of potentially useful background readings (books, mostly) for those who have anti-civ/anarcho-primitivist leanings. This list is a work in progress, and is limited to readings that have played an important part in the formation of my own evolving perspective.
David Abram – The Spell of the Sensuous (1996)
Abram’s writing is frankly amazing. He paints a visceral picture of what it might be like to reestablish intimate connection with the natural world and contact with the abundance of the present moment. As soon as you put it down, you will want to read his next installment, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010)
W.B. Arthur, The Nature of Technology (2009)
Arthur provides an extremely useful general definition of technology, and an easy-to-apply description of how technology evolves. He also highlights the contingencies surrounding technological innovation: the vast majority of innovations are just new combinations of existing technology. When it comes to understanding the nature and evolution of technology, this is in the “read this first” category.
Keith Farnish – Underminers (2013)
This handbook on fighting civilization’s “tools of disconnection,” outlines how our intuitive loyalties are continuously inverted through the channeling of language through corporate mass media. Farnish suggests that by taking control of our own use of language we can start to turn things right-side up in our own minds while at the same time planting seeds of awareness in those around us. For example, the next time you hear someone lamenting the high rate of unemployment, remind yourself that a high unemployment rate means fewer people are living as wage-slaves. High unemployment is also a boon for the environment because fewer factory wage-slaves means there are fewer unnecessary industrial products being manufactured, there is less demand for the unneeded products that are manufactured, there are fewer commuters and thus a drop in the use of fossil fuels, and there are more people with free time to spend on meaningful life pursuits and to establish authentic human connections with their local environment and with other human beings.
Marcella Frangipane (2007). Different types of egalitarian societies and the development of inequality in early Mesopotamia. World Archaeology, 39(2), 151-176
I have included this academic journal article on the list because it provides a fascinating description of the origins of social hierarchy in early agricultural societies, and the subsequent transition from a cooperative to a competitive orientation toward community resources. In addition, it gets into the weeds about the archeological evidence supporting two distinct early agricultural lifestyles in the fertile crescent, one based on a horizontal egalitarian system and one based on a vertical egalitarian system—evidence that dovetails nicely with what Daniel Quinn talks about in Ishmael.
Masanobu Fukuoka – The One-Straw Revolution (1978)
Fukuoka’s book—really a manifesto—presents an approach to organic farming that can serve as a powerful model for a commonsense approach to living in general. He calls his method “do-nothing” farming. It is based on the premise that working with the land’s evolved natural propensities can ultimately yield far superior results compared to modern farming with its monoculture and its labor-intensive environmentally destructive techniques. Fukuoka’s do-nothing approach to farming makes a great analogy—and maybe something more than mere analogy. Industrial civilization forces us to live in an unnatural, highly “cultivated” manner, and by living in this way we destroy our environment in the same way that plants forced to live in industrial monoculture exhaust the soil. And, as with the crops of industrial agriculture, it takes an enormous amount of energy and resources to maintain our lifestyle because we are being forced to live in conditions that run counter to our evolved propensities. Fukuoka’s solution is to stop the machines, let the soil and the plants do what they have been designed to do through several hundred million years of evolutionary fine-tuning. Likewise, the solution to restoring our social environment is to stop the machine of civilization, stop forcing our lives into conformity with an artificial and inhuman mode of being. Out of civilization’s remains will eventually emerge fertile ecological and social “soil” for nurturing all of our human needs.
Stephen J. Gould – Wonderful Life (1989)
If we were to rewind the tape of Earth’s history to the beginning of biological life and let it roll forward again, human life would probably not result. The statistical odds are just too slim. We owe our existence to the occurrence of an uncountable number of arbitrary and highly unpredictable chance events. A stray asteroid here or there, a slightly different pattern of continental drift, more or less rain during a given season, the continued existence of one seemingly trivial now-extinct species, etc., and humans as we know them, wouldn’t exist. Although Gould doesn’t address this specifically, the same logic can be applied to the adoption of agriculture in the fertile crescent, or to the industrial revolution, or to every single technological innovation. It is a direct punch in the stomach to the notions of inevitability and progress.
Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann – One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Journey to Preserve Quiet (2009)
Hempton is an acoustic ecologist who takes his sound equipment on a cross country road trip in search of a place in the US that has yet to be penetrated by the constant noise of civilization. Spoiler: that place doesn’t exist—with the possible exception of a single spot in the middle of the Olympic rain forest. This book is over a decade old at this point, and my sense is that even this last quiet place has been sonically violated by now. The book is not all that well written, but it permanently changed the way that I listen.
Derrick Jensen – End Game Volume 1 (2006)
I ran across Jensen very early on my path to primitivism. The premises that he lists in the front are powerful and provide a solid foundation for thinking about the essence of our circumstances in modern industrial civilization.
Ted Kaczynski – Technological Slavery (2010)
This is in the “required reading” category. No summary necessary: the title says it all. Brush aside the obvious ad hominem repudiations; Kaczynski’s perspective is a powerful and compelling one.
Richard Katz – Indigenous Healing Psychology: Honoring the Wisdom of the First Peoples (2017)
Katz presents an extensive (sometimes meandering) discussion of his experiences with indigenous healers. He provides the expected comparisons between Western notions of healing and those held in the various traditional societies he has lived with. This book made it to the list mostly because of the story he tells in the prologue about “things of power.” Read what I wrote about it here.
Lewis Mumford – Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1 (1966)
This is a fairly dated work, but the bones of Mumford’s ideas about the “megamachine” are still very relevant. Civilizations, from ancient Sumer to the modern day, are massive machines built according to principles of hierarchically organized power relations.
Fredy Perlman – Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (1983)
Perlman’s perspective-altering essay is in a class by itself. It provides a tour through the ravages of history and potent insights on the brutal, bloodthirsty, and decidedly anti-human monstrosity called civilization.
Margaret Power – The Egalitarians, Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization (1991)
This is a useful book for those who want ammunition to counter the Hobbesian “humans are violent by nature” claim. Observational studies of chimpanzees in their natural habitat have consistently found their social lives to be remarkably peaceful and absent any persistent social dominance relations, closely paralleling that found in traditional human foraging societies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the scientific data on chimpanzee social behavior comes from observations conducted in unnatural and highly contrived situations. For example, the much-cited “gang violence” behavior found by Jane Goodall and her students was based primarily on studies where large caches of food were set up to attract chimps from multiple groups. Limited access to this desired resource produced competitive and aggressive behavior (very much like what happens with civilized humans) that does not seem to occur under normal free-foraging circumstances.
Daniel Quinn – Ishmael (1992)
Quinn’s fictional conversation with a telepathic gorilla has been a game-changer for many folks—myself included. Quinn distinguishes between “the leavers” and “the takers.” The leavers are those people (and the rest of the natural world) who live according to the fundamental laws of nature, including the law that you kill only what you need to survive and the law that you don’t actively prevent others from taking what they need. The leavers respect the diversity of the natural world and recognize their place as part of that diversity. The takers, as the name suggests, live by a different code entirely. They see the diversity of the natural world as a threat. They not only take more than they need, but they actively seek out and destroy their competition. Quinn links the historical emergence of agricultural society with the rise of the taker approach and the beginning of widespread displacement of leavers by takers.
Christopher Ryan and Calilda Jethá – Sex at Dawn (2010)
This provides some fascinating insights on human sexuality in its natural (uncivilized) context, and plays up the mismatch between our evolutionary design and our modern-day beliefs. Throughout the book, the authors discuss the problem of Flinstonization: the idea that we tend to think about life in the past through the lens of the present, and assume that the motivations of humans 20k years ago (sexually and otherwise) were similar (or even remotely comparable) to those of the modern day.
Crispin Sartwell – Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory (2008).
This is an excellent place to start if you are looking for a concise and easy to understand perspective on the logic of the anarchist position. Sartwell provides a compelling case that “legitimate authority” is an oxymoron.
Paul Shepard – pretty much everything he ever published, but Nature and Madness (1982) is a good place to start (Thinking Animals and Coming Home to the Pleistocene are equally good).
One of the many interesting insights Shepard provides is that healthy psychological maturation depends on a life embedded in the natural world, a life in which the land and its nonhuman denizens play an essential role in the developmental formation of our essential psychological capacities. The insecurity, impulsiveness, anxiety, alienation, and childishness that define the modern civilized adult are a result of unmet inborn developmental expectations during childhood and adolescence. Nostalgia for childhood, according to Shepard, does not represent a longing for our lost innocence or a desire for a happier or more carefree existence. It is a desire to return to a point in our personal past where a healthy future adult self was still a latent potential, a time before the cumulative damage of civilized life redirected our natural developmental trajectory.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Black Swan (2010)
A Black Swan is any highly improbable event that was entirely unpredictable beforehand but that is perfectly comprehensible and easy to explain after the fact. Every meaningful event in history (and in our personal lives) was a Black Swan. Every single one. The ease with which events can be explained in hindsight leaves us woefully overconfident in our ability to predict what the future (even tomorrow) will be like. This book is up there with Ishmael in terms of being a personal game-changer.
Kevin Tucker – For Wildness and Anarchy (2010)
Tucker is a stalwart voice within the anarcho-primitivism/anti-civ realm. I sample from his writings anytime I need a quick fix. In his more recent book, The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism, and the Death of a Healer (2019), he uses the complex historical underpinnings of modern-day ayahuasca tourism as a vehicle for mapping out the many layers of the colonizing process.
Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (1977)
Winner distinguishes among different categories of technology, provides insight into how it evolves, and offers examples of how it structures our lives. His discussion of reverse adaptation is particularly cogent: technologies may start out serving specific human ends or addressing a highly circumscribed set of problems. But once they come into being, they shape human thought and activity in ways that conform to the structure and organization of the technology itself. The technological solution becomes a way of reframing the original problem, and features of the original problem that do not fit the technological solution are ignored or redefined.
Tyson Yunkaporta – Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2020)
This is truly a remarkable book in terms of its ability to temporarily yank you out of the caustic Western perspective. I’m not sure that I have any better understanding of the Aboriginal view of things after reading this, but my humility—when it comes to the very idea that I have the conceptual and emotional tools for such an understanding to begin with—has been increased ten-fold.
John Zerzan – pretty much everything he has ever written
Zerzan is synonymous with anarcho-primitivism in my mind. Always grounded in commonsense reason, and well-versed in the ideas and insights of a broad range of historical and contemporary thinkers. Cerebral and scholarly, but his is not just a passive intellectual perspective. His most recent book, When We are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics, is outstanding. My favorite line:
“Various ways to employ fire, but none to domesticate it. Be like fire.”
Twilight of the Machines, Future Primitive (and Future Primitive Revised), Why Hope, A People’s History of Civilization are all also highly recommended. I have turned to his works over and over again, and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.