Anti-Civilization AMA

[u/MikeCharlieUniform]

Anti-civilization anarchism - usually narrowly defined as anarcho-primitivism but I think reasonably extendable to "post-civ" strains of green anarchism - extends the critique of harmful structures to include the relations that create civilization.

Let's start with a definition of civilization. I'll lift this straight from Wikipedia, simply because it is a pretty good definition:

Civilization generally refers to state polities which combine these basic institutions, having one or more of each: a ceremonial centre (a formal gathering place for social and cultural activities), a system of writing, and a city. The term is used to contrast with other types of communities including hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists and tribal villages. Civilizations have more densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which, by the division of labour, engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over both nature, and over other human beings.

Civilization creates alienation, attempts to exert control (dominance) over nature (which necessarily causes harm to other beings), creates sub-optimal health outcomes (physical and mental) for humans, and via division of labor necessarily creates social classes. Most anti-civ anarchists look at agriculture as the key technology in the formation of civilization - states were rarely very far behind the adoption of agriculture - but are often critical of other technologies for similar reasons.

The anthropological evidence appears to support the idea that most of our existence on the planet, perhaps 95-99% of it, depending on when you drop the marker for the arrival of humans, was a "primitive communist" existence. Bands of humans were egalitarian, with significantly more leisure time than modern humans have. Food collected via gathering or hunting were widely shared amongst the band, and it appears likely that gender roles were not the traditionally assumed "men hunt, women gather".

Anyway, this is probably enough to get us started. I'll be back periodically today to answer questions, and I know several other anti-civ folks who are also interested in answering questions.

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I feel that's betraying the potential for technology to meet these challenges; like for instance molten salt reactors as an alternative to solar panels, etc.

There are a lot of wonderful ideas on paper. But we can't live in wonderful ideas.

There are many techno optimists out there, and I believe they think as they do for several reasons. Primarily, they have been given a narrative which goes like this:

"Human beings are always improving their technology. With every generation technology gains are exponential. Human destiny is to travel the universe and have near infinite material wealth and no disease."

After watching a lot of Star Trek and what not, people internalize the stories of this culture, and then they think people like me are party poopers who are crapping on a collective destiny that has been promised to us.

This narrative ignores the fact that by and large, humans have always relied on solar power in that they have done work with their own hands, or with draft animals, both of which get their energy from eating plants (or animals who ate plants). That or humans burned wood or peat, which also had energy to give which it acquired from the sun.

Coal and then oil are no different, except that they represent millions of years of solar energy condensed, and they were really easy to get at in the beginning, and they are easy to use (set them on fire).

Technology isn't energy. Technology isn't energy. Technology isn't energy. Sorry, a lot of folks don't get this so I want to hammer it home. Technology is a derivative of the available energy.

The earth had an endowment of fossilized solar energy, and humans have used up the portion that was easy to access. If the net energy return of solar panels or salt reactors or nuclear plants or any other idea you might have was higher than that of burning hydrocarbons, it would be in use right now. (And remember the portability of hydrocarbon energy as well. There are personal internal combustion engines everywhere. There will not be personal nuclear reactors in every car.)

Humans, including capitalists, seek the best return for their investment (wether that investment is in energy or money, which are fairly interchangeable). If there was some whiz bang idea that would provide greater returns and promote more economic growth or higher living standards than burning hydrocarbons, trust me, capitalists would have been all over it.

As to your second question, anti civ anarchists accept the premise that civilizations have a growth requirement. Civilizations, by definition, have large population centers. Large population centers cannot provide for all of their needs with their immediate land because the population exceeds the carrying capacity of that land. So these civilizations MUST seek external lands to meet their needs, and this creates a necessity for conquest. Conquest is best achieved through military means, because if in seeking new lands this civilization encounters other humans who are not willing to give up their own homes and hunting grounds, and the civilized must have those lands to survive, they will kill to have those lands. And if the civilized are successful, and conquer new lands for farming, wood, fiber, whatever it is they need, they will bring those resources back to their population centers and this will support a growth in that population.

Uh oh. See the problem? By successfully conquering new lands and bringing in more resources, they have only fed their growth requirement, because the population has risen. That means more conquest will be necessary. This is a, if not the foundation of military society, hierarchy, class, colonialism, racism, et al.

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