For the past few days I’ve done little else beyond these three things: eat a little, read a little, and play many hours of Medieval II: Total War, another three-year-old video game that I’m playing for the first time now. It’s fun but, for many reasons, awful.
I just Googled "total fucking annihilation" (no quotes) looking for pictures of battlefields or something and totally forgot that there actually is a strategy game called Total Annihilation. Hhh.
Last week I also played another game in the franchise for the first time, Empire: Total War, which is basically just about the conquest of North America I guess, and I commented to my friend how completely unapologetic the game is for its premise—and that premise is, I would say, a total bummer. The premise is basically Here are the Indians; go kill them! Of course you and your good Europeans justify this slaughter by deeming the Indians as threats that therefore need to be dealt with, but any player should be privy to this falsification. Those threatening savages were the ones that let you occupy some land to begin with, dummy.
Medieval doesn’t have quite the same premise, but … well, I’ll put it this way: the “win conditions” for the Grand Campaign mode are to hold 45 regions of the map—most of Europe and a bit of Africa and the Mid-East—including Jerusalem. That’s basically it; you go about pursuing that end however you feel necessary.
Every strategy game I’ve ever come across has had this implicit imperative for growth built into it, and even when I was younger this didn’t quite make sense to me. I remember when my mom’s ex-husband, my step-father at the time, bought Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and I just got bored with it the few times I played it. You start from nothing and expand your empire—but why? what’s the point? There really isn’t one—other than that being the only point of the game. A few years ago I bought the game Black and White because a few years prior to the purchase I thought it was an interesting premise. I installed it and played it for a little while two different times, but the most recent time (which wasn’t actually very recent at all) I just got so fed up with the growth premise that I couldn’t bring myself to play it anymore. (I was also fed up with the idea of being a god who must constantly intervene in the lives of his subjects, but that is a different story).
So back to Medieval—the whole point is to conquer all of Europe; there is, seemingly, no other reason to play the game. What if I just want to create and run a nation that runs smoothly and deal with my enemies whenever they pop up? Well then I can’t win the game. As opposed to games like those in The Elder Scrolls series, as well as most other RPG games, this isn’t a game based in fantasy where the only real point is to have an adventure with your character, where the main storyline isn’t even necessary, but just there as a sort of interesting quest to complete if you want.
No, this one is based in history. Of course the whole point is to rewrite history in a manner that satisfies you—or many different ways, since you’ll probably play the game as more than one nation—but the manner that would satisfy me would be to eliminate the growth imperative that’s implicit in each of these nations. Instead of letting people be with their nature-based pagan religions I have to spread Catholicism; instead of peacefully coexisting with my neighbors and allies and dealing with threats as they pop up, the douchebags betray alliances and march their armies to my castle walls. And all of the rebel tribes? How am I to know what they are rebelling against? I’ve tried to be a good king—indeed, my reputation is “Reliable” versus “Mixed,” or “Dubious” like the jackass Danes who just betrayed my alliance for no reason, and the dick-hole French are continually marching into my territory and saying “give us 600 florins or we’ll gut you, bitch” and just straight up attacking me for no god-damned reason—but it’s preposterous to assume that each tribe has done something so unacceptable as to warrant their outright elimination. The premise of this video game is insane, but still people enjoy it. I am enjoying it. What is wrong with us? What is wrong with me?
I do see one potential outcome in which I achieve the victory I desire—that is, stopping the growth imperative and allowing people to live as they wish to live: conquer all of Europe, all of the growth-nations, and then say “Nuh uh, motherfuckers” by refusing to expand anymore, because my nation will not be a nation that worships growth. And so we come to the trilemma presented by the parable of the tribes (join the violent tribe, fight the violent tribe, or run away from the violent tribe—in all three instances the paradigm of the violent tribe expands), and in this case the only way to defeat the growth imperative is to become the growth imperative yourself.
I don’t know why I’m letting this game bum me out.
I see no reason why I should not be able to use my cellular phone, my good sir. You, my friend, are just a pessimist.
So things look bad—that seems pretty clear. How do we save it all?
Well, I think I’ve illustrated that (a) we can’t and (b) we shouldn’t even want to. It is in the nature of civilization, and especially its current deployment in the global modern society, to grow, and growth cannot be sustained. Of course this isn’t the only thing wrong with civilization, as many authors have pointed out and can illustrate better than I can (Jason Godesky in his Thirty Theses illustrated a number of them, and these are linked in my sidebar), but I guess the fact that this way of life cannot endure is what I’m most interested in.
So if the system is broken and the system cannot last, then what? Some say “Fix it,” but I would argue that it cannot be fixed. It is in the nature of civilization to grow, just like it is in the nature of a tiger to hunt. You cannot change its nature without changing its entire being. If, as tigers continue to evolve (if there are any left after this century), their behavior changes enough that their descendants do not even hunt anymore, these descendants will be of a new species.
The question remains. Throw out this system and replace it with something new, something that works. But what?
This is a valid question. To it, I have a simple answer: Replace it with a lifestyle that works, no matter what the new lifestyle is. Daniel Quinn, in Ishmael and The Story of B, and even though I haven’t read his other books I would assume he makes the point in those as well, points out that the lifestyle of the Leavers has worked for three million years and continues to work to this day. What is necessary is a lifestyle that will work indefinitely—and here’s the important part: whatever it takes. If that means using stone-age technology, then fine. If that means a drastic reduction in the scale of modern technology, then fine.
So you’re saying we should all go back to living like cavemen? No, not exactly. But if I was? So what? Like or dislike has nothing to do with it. You can like living a certain way as much as you want, but it doesn’t mean living that way will work in the long term, or that it’s good for you. Addicts like the way their drug of choice makes them feel, but it often ruins their lives or kills them. The fear of becoming “cavemen” is a knee-jerk reaction that comes from the belief that we are more “highly evolved” than cavemen. This is an utterly ridiculous idea, of course, but that doesn’t even matter; this lifestyle cannot work, so it must be replaced by something that does—whatever it takes, whether we like it or dislike it. Of course I would prefer to like this lifestyle—only a masochist would prefer not to, and even then in his preference for an unpleasant life he’d still be choosing a life he would enjoy—but whether or not it’s like-able is still completely irrelevant.
People often make a very interesting leap when criticizing primitivist philosophy. Here is one quote I just came across while skimming reviews for a book by John Zerzan: “Zerzan thinks we need to dismantle our overly technological society. And I think that’s a very poor idea.” I find this to be very representative of the views a lot of people have about a “primitivist” idea they don’t understand. I haven’t read this book yet to know for sure, but usually these “primitivists” and anti-civ authors explain why civilization is unsustainable and take the position that they’ll take a life that is, no matter what that means. The haters jump right over all the evidence showing why it cannot be sustained and instead go to “I WANT MY COMPUTER COMMIE.” I can restate this point again and again: You might want your computer, but if your computer can’t stay on because, maybe, for instance, you can’t pay your electricity bill, you won’t be able to use it. Your preferences will not determine what does and doesn’t work. I don’t dislike having a computer in front of me right now, but if tomorrow I cannot use it, I will not be angry (unless it is stolen from me or destroyed by some asshole—but this is not the point). The same goes for every technology; if its use can no longer be prolonged or justified, out it goes.
Finding a lifestyle that will work for modern humans will require a lot of hard work, will require tough decisions, and it will be a long and difficult fight, but whatever that lifestyle shall be, it shall be. It will be what is, no matter what it is, because that’s what it’s going to take to make things work. We can argue about it all we want, but ask yourself: Would you want to live in a world run by heroin addicts? I wouldn’t, because that world would fall apart.
The world we live in now isn’t so different. It is falling apart and eventually, one day, it won’t work anymore. We can wait for it to stop working or we can work on building a better world now. I say we do it now. How about you?
(This post was intentionally somewhat vague. With the hope that I can stimulate comments and discussions I’m trying to keep my posts shorter because I know people don’t usually want to read something really long. Maybe this will work; maybe it won’t.)
After I visited the topic of what is and isn’t “natural,” the subject popped up in a few other places and kind of occupied a space in my mind for a few weeks. Through a few conversations I think I came to a position I’m rather pleased with.
I think it’s important to remember that the word nature can mean more than just one thing. When I say nature I like for it to be kind of an accumulation of the different meanings. Nature is more than just what is out there, what’s 100 miles away from civilization, where there are just the birds, bears, and butterflies. Nature isn’t just a place, or a thing, but the sum of all things and how all things work. I don’t think we can think about nature unless we think about the nature of things. And each thing has a nature of its own, and the nature of the whole is different than the nature of a single thing.
The subject I’m analyzing is essentially the question of How do humans fit in with and interact with nature? It would then seem natural to question human nature. There are very different ideas about what is and isn’t in the nature of human beings; however, I sense that it’s popular to just write off bad things as being merely human nature—Oh, there is nothing we can do about it, it’s human nature, so let’s just move on. I think many of these assertions are simply preposterous. It would be very hard to write up a neat outline of things all humans do and title that outline Human Nature—I don’t actually think it could be done—but it’s rather common for people to only blame bad things on our nature. It’s only human nature to be bad to one another, they say. War is the human way; from childhood we’re violent and we have to have that violence taught out of us. Humankind is silly, stupid, petty, vindictive. Garbage ideas, I believe, that are actually scornful toward our cultural conditioning and social circumstances rather than our feelings toward the others of our species, but since this post isn’t meant to be an anti-civ piece, I’ll skip all of that.
Earlier in the year I read a good post about the belief that people are innately evil, and I really liked one passage in particular:
So there is a pretty easy reply to people who say that man is innately evil, that without a control apparatus people would just go around killing and stealing, and so on and so forth, the reply being “who would you kill first?” Of course they do not want to kill anyone, and they will say so, although they are convinced that the masses harbour in their hearts a desire to kill.1
As scientific people I do feel there are many parts of our own nature which we can identify. To do so, however, I think we must look at all of human history. Since this too goes into the rise of civilization, I’ll leave that for another day, and I’ll be getting at civilization extensively in at least one upcoming post. The human nature thread will end here. Related, though, is animal nature.
Totally natural, right?
I have read or heard somewhere, and I’m paraphrasing, that if tigers or sharks (I can’t remember which) had the choice, they too would “rule the world” and watch TVs and fly around in airplanes. This is supposed to be silly, and it is, but I don’t think it even makes a good point. The point is supposed to be that any species would choose to live as humans do if given the choice, but I can demonstrate the falseness of this belief rather simply: It is not in the nature of tigers or sharks to do these things, or else they would have been doing these things. Understandably this might sound like I’m saying it is in human nature to watch TV and fly planes, so the statement requires a clarifier: It isn’t necessarily in human nature to watch TV, but the human has the genetic tools that enable him to—that is, his nature makes it possible.
In Ishmael Daniel Quinn made the point that man was simply the first to reach a certain level of complexity, a level that enabled him to become self-aware. He wrote that in the future others may also become self-aware, and that it is therefore the responsibility of humans to do a good job at being the first. The genetic descendants of tigers or sharks, or perhaps dolphins or another primate species, might someday watch TVs and fly airplanes, but it is not in the nature of any of these animals to do these things now. Might they be conditioned into this behavior? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have the right genetic tools to. If a tiger could choose TV or the hunt, he would undoubtedly choose the hunt because he doesn’t understand TV.
But to get back to humans, I think I can now explore our place within nature and our interaction with it. I think a lot of people say “Humans are a part of nature,” but in a way mean “Humans are nature.” Of course people are only representative of a small part of the whole. I believe this also illustrates a kind of backward fallacy of division2—that is, since humans are a part of nature, and nature is good, then humans (and all the things they do) are good. Last time I touched this topic I told of an observation: People who raise the humans are a part of nature; therefore everything they do is natural point tend to raise it in a way that suggests humans can do no wrong; if what we do is natural it’s implied that it’s supposed to be that way, that there is no way to change it, and that we should just not worry about it.
During the conversations I had, and I find this to be true in others I’ve come across as well, the point that humans are indeed a part of nature came up quite clearly. It’s a messy subject, as we can see, and it’s made messier when you come to a seeming contradiction: on the one hand we want to make sure that everyone knows we’re just another species, a subject in the animal kingdom just like every other animal species, but we also have to account for the very real human differences. It might be that because of self-awareness people are able to watch TV and fly in planes, and those things might be completely natural, but since no other species does these things it’s very hard to say it is the natural way. It’s very hard to justify the human destruction of everything non-human just by saying “Oh, it’s natural.” No other species does this; that is natural.
I’ve realized the total irrelevancy of whether or not wholesale destruction of ecosystems is natural. Even though I think it’s pretty hard to explain how this premeditated destruction of our own support systems is natural, it doesn’t matter whether it is or not. It might be natural or unnatural, right or wrong—but one thing is certain: it’s insane. Who cares what words we use; it’s fucking crazy. It doesn’t matter that a car would never appear unless a person created it, and whether or not the car is a product of nature doesn’t matter either. What matters is that people are destroying entire ecosystems all over the world, driving a massive extinction as I type this, and that they aren’t stopping any time soon. Whether or not this is natural, or even a part of human nature is completely irrelevant; people are killing everything else in the world, and unless more realize it and stop (this being an important step), they’ll kill themselves too. And guess what? That’s nature. Even if people are acting naturally, it’s not in the nature of our support system to allow itself to be killed, so it will fight back (and win).
But even with this realization, I still think there is some reason to defend the word, to guard it from complete abuse.
In all discussions it’s generally agreed that natural is taken to mean that which occurs without human intervention (agreed by most, that is; there are usually the one or two people arguing against everyone else and saying, “No! Humans are natural! Everything humans do is natural!”). I already said that I don’t like the fanciful idea that humans aren’t a part of nature, so it makes sense that I don’t find this definition entirely agreeable either. Still, it makes sense in most instances. One of my friends put it rather well when he said, and I’m paraphrasing once again, that we wouldn’t have a word for it if the word didn’t represent something. I liked that a lot. So long as humans go on changing environments to suit them instead of changing themselves to suit environments, which is what every other evolving species does, we do need to represent the world without human influence.
Natural works—it provides that representation for now. But I’d like to make an amendment. Instead of just saying it’s human action that determines whether or not we use the word we should consider nature what just is without any external phenomenon. Thunderstorms and tornadoes are totally natural, but they aren’t what we would expect on a daily basis. Nature is the sum of all parts, but some of the parts can’t be representative of the whole. A tornado isn’t nature; one forested region isn’t nature; humans, tigers, and sharks aren’t nature. Human behavior might be natural, but it cannot be what defines nature. A tornado cannot define nature. Nature defines itself.
Notes and Links
- The belief that people are innately evil. (part 1/2) at francoistremblay.wordpress.com
- Fallacy: Division at nizkor.org
A few more pages.
I still have a batch of quotes to paste as a blog post. I hate that I’ve been doing that, because I hate it when people create blogs only to forward news without adding anything of value themselves, so I’m almost done. The reason I’ve been doing it is basically just so I don’t forget I have a blog. I feel like I need to remember it because sometimes I forget about it for a month and, at this moment, I need something to keep my mind occupied so I don’t go crazy. I have two pretty involved additions to make to this blog that I’m working on—one that requires a lot of reading and contextualizing, and another that requires a lot of quoting, linking, and explaining—but they might be another week off, so instead I’m posting this.
A few days ago I started to re-read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Today I’m posting the eighth chapter, what I remember to be my favorite chapter (although I won’t know for sure until I’m finished). This chapter explains almost everything that is wrong with Taker culture in a neat 23 pages. If I could get my loved ones to read just 23 pages from any text and expect them to understand the predicament industrial civilization has gotten itself into, these 23 pages would be the ones I would pick. And with that, here they are.
More Evolved, part 2
Richard Dawkins, mentioned in the first part, for those who don’t know (of) him, is an evolutionary biologist whom I respect and whose work I respect. He is, however, quite plain about how his work relates to his personal worldview and philosophy. He has said evolution is incompatible with how he feels the world should work. Basically I take this to mean that he is for a divorce from biology, put in the most basic way, but since I’m not sure which political points he says this in reference to (because frankly I’m more interested in his explanations of how natural selection works than his (lack of) religious views and more interested in his religious views than his political views) I can’t say for sure if this is indeed the case.
I, on the other hand, am 100% in favor of embracing every bit of our biology and not working against it. I feel this is relevant in at least three different ways, but I’ll break the rest of this down into reproduction, vice, and modern medicine.
Is this a weird porn flick or a b-movie? You decide! Googled "doctors and drug addicts and prostitutes oh my!" (no quotes) for this one.
Reproduction
I’ve heard from various people and at many times that they will not have children of their own because there are already millions of children in this world that need care and that it is selfish (therefore, I can extrapolate, that it’s also immoral, no?) to have children of your own just so we can have “a little biological copy of us running around.”
Let me be perfectly clear about something here: The only reason you are alive is because you have the biological urge to reproduce, but in some people, the ones that say it’s selfish to have kids, that urge is hidden within their genes in such a way that they have limited psychological access to it. And let me be clear about something else: It’s OK to want to reproduce.
Why are we here? To reproduce. It really is that simple, and we really are alive for no other reason. I believe it was actually in The Blind Watchmaker that I came across a simple truism that stated, goofily, DNA prefers replication because it has the makeup to make it so. If DNA didn’t insist that we reproduce, we wouldn’t, and we would die off. Every species that exists today has the biological urge to reproduce or else it wouldn’t exist today. A mutation that would result in a diminished or non-existent urge to reproduce would quickly remove itself from the gene pool. This is such a simple idea to understand, yet many people refuse to understand it, opting instead to reject and demonize their biology. The only people I’m willing to believe truly don’t have a reproductive desire are the ones that abstain from sex altogether. Having sex in any fashion, even masturbating, is a reflection of the desire to reproduce.
You’ve got a ready response. “I don’t want to reproduce, so ha!” you say. “Sex just feels good so I have sex anyway. I use a condom/birth control, so that’s positive proof that I don’t want to reproduce! Neener neener, ha ha!”
My answer to this is simply to first re-read the last few paragraphs, and after you’ve done that, I’ll point out that intercourse only feels good because of the biological necessity for it. Is that a bold assertion? Perhaps to some, but when framed properly it shouldn’t be all that shocking. I once read a biologist’s response to a query about why, in terms of evolution, sweet foods tasted sweet. His answer was rather simple, but surprising in a way. Sweet foods have high sugar contents, and foods that have high sugar contents generally yield high amounts of energy. The sweet taste, therefore, was because of the high energy content. As it is commonly understood, we like sweet foods because they taste good, but that’s not the real story. It’s not that we like sweet food because it is sweet, but that we developed a taste for these high-energy foods because of their energy content. When humans foraged exclusively, sweet, sugary foods weren’t nearly as easy to get a hold of as they are today, but because of the high energy they were a sought after food; this has carried over to today and it’s why we still like sweets, even with their adverse health effects.
It is the same deal with sex. People don’t have sex because it feels good; rather, sex feels good because of the biological need for it. This does not apply in the reverse—that is, we did not evolve the biological need for sex because it felt good—because that doesn’t make any damn sense.
Vice
Here is a hypothetical situation: A forager develops a heroin addiction. Somehow he also has easy access to a large supply—an infinite supply—of his new drug of choice. He feels good all the while he is high, but his biological needs are not any less valid because he likes being high. He is now on junk all the time, and since he has an infinite supply and it feels infinitely good, he has stopped foraging. Since his heroin addiction has started to conflict with his everyday habits, the ones that keep him alive in a real sense, he eventually dies (but much sooner than he would have were he to live into old age).
Civilization created the possibility of drug and alcohol abuse, and by its doing so also perpetuated these behaviors by safe-guarding the addict. This is especially so in modern times, when addicts are saved from themselves, sometimes time after time after time, whereas in non-civilized cultures he probably wouldn’t have developed an addiction in the first place due to limited access and would have died while out in “the wild” because being high is not conducive to continued survival. This is why it is said that addiction runs in the family; people who are substance abusers are not allowed to eliminate themselves from the gene pool, and therefore the genes that cause them to abuse proliferate.
This is one of the ways by which natural selection is being very obviously avoided. Where humans are still actively participating in the process of natural selection, addictions do not occur, and if they did they would only occur for a little while. Simple, really.
Modern Medicine
In much the same way, modern medicine is a way to actively avoid being naturally selected against. I’m sure that is a controversial statement, and I’m not sure of its popularity, even among anti-civ folks. The reality of it is, still, undeniable.
Is this to say that I am “against” modern medicine? The answer to that question would be convoluted. Am I against people having sex because it feels good? No. Am I against addicts? Oof. I think they should be able to self-destruct—I’ll put it that way, and I suppose that could be taken as either a yes or a no.
My answer is a difficult one to formulate because on the one hand is the biology, and on the other the fact that civilization is actively creating new conditions that it then treats people for. In a sense, then, civilization should bear the responsibility of healing the ills it has created. But is it acceptable to treat people for cancer which industry has given them while refusing to treat someone born with a chronic illness due to a genetic mutation? I’m not willing to answer that question. Even if I answered yes, would that be an effective solution? Certainly not, since the source of the ailment—industrial civilization itself—will never be treated voluntarily. As far as the presence of modern medicine is concerned, I cannot make a judgment. I can, however, still see the ways in which it is running civilized humans away from natural selection.
In the same way addicts would die out in “the wild,” so too would folks with chronic conditions that impeded their survival. Beneficial traits tend to have a higher representation in the gene pool because those traits aid in survival, but detrimental traits have a lower, if not non-existent, representation because they do the opposite of aiding survival.
Obvious genetic “defects” therefore relate quite obviously to survival, but even the classic without modern medicine you would break a leg and die can be scrutinized in a similar fashion. Those who are most prone to break legs (or, more accurately, those most likely to break legs before reaching an age they can reproduce at) will have a lower representation in the gene pool. But of course this is just extrapolation since the broken leg argument is actually a moral argument—that is, an Oh no! How terrible! argument. The world doesn’t care if you’ll die because of a broken leg—we do. It’s the one that broke your leg in the first place. That doesn’t mean the world is a total dick, though, because it also let you exist. I once came across a quote from Mr. Dawkins that fits here. “Nature is neither kind nor cruel,” he says, “but indifferent,” whether you are experiencing jubilation or suffering. He might want nature to be indifferent only to our jubilation while our suffering is eliminated, but I’m OK with its indifference at all points.
from → Nature, Social commentary