Month: March 2020

My dog tested positive for heartworms. As a result, she’s been confined to a crate for the past month and a half. Heartworm treatment involves three painful injections of a potent antiparasitic drug, the first two given a month apart, and the third given the day after the second. During the entire time, and for 6-8 weeks afterward, she has to remain under severe exercise restriction—basically no exercise at all beyond a couple brief trips outside each day to relieve herself. As the dead worms start to break apart, the risk of pulmonary embolism is extremely high, so it is important the she remain as still as possible until the worm carcasses have disintegrated to the point where they are no longer a threat.

It occurred to me today that the dog’s situation, confined to her cage, is a microcosm of my own present circumstances: confined to my apartment as a result of the State’s “stay-at-home” mandate. The difference, of course, is that for me, at least for the time being, the parasitic threat remains on the outside.

We can learn from this virus, I think. The coronavirus has highlighted vulnerabilities that are an inherent part of civilized life, vulnerabilities that no amount of hoarding of toilet paper or stockpiling of personal protective equipment can eliminate, vulnerabilities that are built into the very nature of civilization itself. The virus has given us a small taste of the depth and scope of our dependency, and a concrete sense of our powerlessness as individuals. And it has also brought the inside-out priorities of our corporate consumer system into high relief. The truth is being stated publicly and unabashedly at this point: the well-being of the economy is vastly more important that the lives of actual persons.

And about that $2 trillion coronavirus bill? Let’s be clear, the recently passed stimulus bill is not at all about people. It is about keeping the corporate parasites alive—a kind of reverse heartworm treatment approach. Its sole purpose is to keep the economic system from stroking out while the virus forces consumer markets into severe exercise restriction.

I ran across this on a hike today. Someone, kids, perhaps, had scratched spirals in the ground at the base of a tree, and then filled them in with pinecones and twigs. The sight of these pinecone-twig spirals made me smile—a response that was entirely unlike the angry visceral reaction I had to the gratuitous stacks of rocks that I came across on the trail the other day.

And I need to figure out why the difference.

Maybe it has something to do with placement. Most of the cairns were above ground, on top of tree stumps and logs, outside of a rock’s natural habitat, so to speak. By contrast, and ignoring the spiral pattern, the pinecones and twigs seem quite at home on the ground at the base of a tree.  

Maybe the dramatic difference in my reactions is partially due to aesthetic differences in the two cases. While some of the rock stacks have a kind of pleasing and unexpected symmetry to them, there is not much else about their form or arrangement that I find appealing. They are just individual rocks piled on top of each other. On the other hand, the pinecone-twig spirals are compelling beyond just a surface symmetry, and as soon as I saw them I was reminded of Bonnie, my very good artist friend (the word good applies to both artist and friend) who makes extensive use of natural forms like these (see the cover art for my books Stones and Born Expecting the Pleistocene for examples of her work). The spiral forms lightly scratched into the ground are a kind of fractal mirror of both the structure of pinecones and the needle patterns on the twigs.

I strongly suspect, however, that the difference reflects something about me that has changed since I first ran across the cairns on the trail, something about my way of thinking about these acts of forest vandalism.

In her reply to my post about the rock stacks, Ria suggested that interacting with natural forms in this way is a clumsy attempt to fill a void. Civilized humans are drawn to re-embrace their wild nature, but don’t know what to do about it. Like a 4th-grade boy who has a powerful crush on a girl, so he pulls her hair and calls her names.

We are born carrying the active residue of several million years of evolutionary preparation for life entirely immersed in the natural world as a foraging species of social primate, and at least 250,000 years of genetic fine tuning for a life in small, self-contained, nomadic or semi-nomadic, and intensely egalitarian gatherer-hunter bands. The gulf separating (so-called) life in civilization and our inborn physical, psychological, and social expectations is an ever-widening canyon. Yet, on some level at least, we can still feel the other side, and stacking rocks and arranging twigs and pinecones in a spiral pattern might reflect trifling but legitimate attempts to make contact.

Rather than become angered that people are compelled to leave their mark on natural spaces, perhaps I should celebrate some of their unconscious motives for doing so. The fact that the impulse to interact with the natural world is still present is a sign of hope. It is a sign that civilization hasn’t completely snuffed out our wild human nature. After all, someone took the time to search out these pinecones. They carried them against the skin of their hand and felt their texture, and they could smell the woody musty scent of the earth beneath the tree as they bent down to arrange them. And, maybe, for a fleeting moment, they got a tiny glimpse of the other side of the canyon.

Meadowdale Park today: cold, but intensely sunny on the beach. I’ve missed this place—a knee injury has kept me off the steep trail for the last few months. In the interim, someone has raised several small cairns, stacks of rocks, some only two stones high. They have been placed on stumps, along the sides of fallen trees, and on the backs of the benches spaced at intervals along the path.

I am bothered by this. On some level, I find the cairns aesthetically pleasing. But they don’t belong here. They are entirely unnecessary as trail markers, and they are entirely out of place surrounded by mossy limbs and nurse trees, the white trunks of leafless alder, and the sound of the rain-engorged stream echoing up from the base of the ravine. The stacks of rocks are an act of forest vandalism—more than that, they are a defilement, a desecration.

And I want to knock them all down.

What is the motivation to stack rocks like this? I suppose that it is the same motivation that lies behind all acts of creation, all acts of artistic expression. We seem to have a need to leave behind physical traces of ourselves. The cairns are symbolic monuments to their builder’s passing presence: “I was here, in this place, and here’s the proof!”

All monuments serve this function to some extent. The motivation behind the cairns is, at its heart, an attempt to cope with personal mortality. It is the same motivation that lies behind skyscrapers, perhaps. The desire to leave a physical mark in the world has its source in the awareness that your life is temporary, and the gnawing suspicion that it is also completely trivial.

I probably won’t knock the rock-stacks down. At least not today. Even if I don’t knock them down, the weather eventually will. Or a squirrel. All attempts to leave a lasting trace of yourself behind are ultimately doomed.

And, in time, the rocks themselves will eventually find their way downhill and take their place in the sand on this sunny beach.

[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…