[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…
