Some suggest that modern progressive exuberance has replaced Christianity as the modern culture or religion.
Capitalism, and the need to expand production to increase the ratio of user value and exchange value, to extract surplus value, arose only under Christianity, and many scholars have said capitalism needed the mass compartmentalization of Christianity, to be able to arise.
This is speculation. However, capitalism first arose in the Italian City states of the 15th Century, which had rediscovered Greek thought and technology, and combined it with Christian compartmentalism and extreme anthropocentric view toward reality.
However, we are all takers, it's just capitalism is the extreme form of this short term survival strategy.

I share the philosophical thrust of this post. The last three or four sentences that tell us what we must do is all fine and dandy but it just leaves you hanging because that is the very problem we face. How do you just go out and get a group of friends and set up an alternative, departing from the existing paradigm and making it really be viable. It just seems like so much wishful thinking.

Bravo bravo

I agree 100% and in fact I and my family are actively pursuing this course.

We are all reducing our possessions, our consumption, our frantic participation in commercialism, and amping up our cultivation of earth, animals, friends, relationships, music.

It sounds trite and simplistic even to my ears but truly life keeps getting better the more we put into this new way.

There is no way I can convince any of our extended family members to partake even though their lives are getting visibly worse with each new development. They simply can not conceive of purposfully"going backwards", the would rather let the system force it on them in a bad way. Victims.

Back to it.

Cheers!

This guy is scatter shooting pure hypotheticals. He invents his own unique definition of "culture" and says we all have to cram ourselves into it in order to get back to the garden. Nobody invented culture, however defined, and no overly intellectualized rant is going to change it. Culture just is and is always changing.

That's the deal. Take it or Leave it.

Quinn imagines a quaint fantasy world that never existed and never will. Real hunter-gatherer societies were engaged in constant tribal warefare that killed as much as 50% of all men. Women had no choice but to be continually raped and plop out children as fast as humanly possible. Average lifespan was some 20-30 years.

Other tribes were part of the outgroup, they were more often than not considered more like animals than fellow humans.

Good radical essay. I'm a bit loopy this week for health reasons, but a few comments based on this day's headspace.

The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow from what we can from the present that fits within the structure of the past. This is the only way we will make a difference. We have to become the change we want to see, find like minded friends, and start our own local tribes. We must develop a high enough level of group self reliance that will allow us to walk away. We need doers, not talkers, not surfers, and not bloggers. We need to be walking toward something better, not away from something we don’t like. Its time to start living your truth.

Finding like-minded people and starting tribes is stimulating, and with the right friends even satisfying. I've done it in the service of earth goals in the past, may do it again. Yet to a strong degree, "walking toward new tribes/cultures" is a theme which is integral to our existing culture, perhaps most extant human cultures. It is how this culture got here in the first place, and there are de facto error-correction mechanisms in human society which tend to flatten out the differences between adjacent tribes.

Rather than new tribal offshoots for the future, I'd say we need to change what it means to be human now, in the sense of our contextual rationale for existence. (And I don't think this is necessarily a disagreement with the spirit of the essay).

Don't get me wrong, I respect those who are trying to have a zero carbon footprint and live their lives with a rational worldview married to the sacred in nature. But is it really enough, in this moment of planetary crisis? Is it what the living earth needs?

In my experience, unless shaped by implacable adversity, tribes tend to turn to shit once the dynamic personalities of the original founders are lost. There are obviously exceptions, but it takes a lot of ongoing psychological energy for non-isolated tribes to live adjacent to others and not assimilate their ways and rationalizations. Goal-oriented tribes tend to have a fairly short half-life unless the goal is immediate survival. And I think that immediate survival will ultimately be what forms the tribes and beliefs which survive, if any get a chance to.

To let oneself see humanity as an intelligent alien, or member of another species would currently see it is to experience a profound spiritual malaise verging on desperation. Yet it's a good first step in the mental divorce process.

So do we become the change we want to see? I don't think so. We cannot step directly into the moccasins of those humans who may inhabit the earth in 10,000 years, who - if they exist at all - will have evolved systems of knowledge based on what is available to them after being strained through a stochastic sieve, and will see the world in a way very different than we do.

Rather, I'd submit that it's our individual responsibility as polluting fire-demons in malignant population overshoot to come to a productive accord with the nausea, accept the rather preposterous reality of our existence, and utilize our fire-demon powers to make it possible for those future people, so many ways unlike us, to exist. To realize that the protein in our muscles is mostly from natural gas, and the energy in our food comes mainly from fossil fuels, and that we are not, and should not pretend to be, those future people in balance with the earth. We're individual members of a plague species, living NOW, who have to some degree started to become self-aware.

One doesn't halt a fire by walking away from it, and bombs don't defuse themselves. I would submit the wildly un-PC notion that each of us should do everything in our power to undo the ongoing and potential damage of thousands of other humans. To try steering any accessible aspects of the population/resource/energy/biodiversity/carrying capacity bottleneck which can be steered towards long-term livability. And that we should do it with a near-total lack of regard for our personal or cultural survival, much less our social status. Then, if we survive it, we should write our songs.

If there are surviving humans to have a culture in 10,000 years, it's nearly certain that their number and identity will have been selected by chaotic outcomes beyond our current planning even in principle. I strongly doubt that any tribes constituted in the near future will get through the meat-grinder in one piece.

The living fabric of our world is under attack, and metaphorically (and not just metaphorically) on fire. We vacillate between considering ourselves victims or bystandards at the blaze, when what are needed are firefighters infused with focused, disciplined berserker energy.

We need to be willing to die for a better far future, and to strategically insert ourselves into what will often be unpleasant situations in the meanwhile, all with no guarantee we'll succeed. To throw ourselves willingly into the chaos after mastering those arts and leverages which are currently available to us, and act from moment to moment with our eyes firmly on goals a million years in the future. To realize that we're destructive fire-demons sprung from a population of destructive fire-demons, unsustainable detritovores from birth, and not shrink from employing any powers we can in the service of life's future.

I think this means not dropping out and walking away, but engaging the crisis without fear, self-interest, or the hubris of personal purity and detachment. In the current preposterous context, walking away might be just one more kind of "taking". I'm not sure we have the right.

Your mileage may vary...

No need to tell me I'm nuts, I realize it. Cheers.

We throw around the word "civilization" as if we all somehow understand what it means.

Civilization is life lived in large groups, in cities and towns, with divisions of labor, and laws governing how we interact with each other (civility). Money is usually involved as it is the means whereby natural things (like food) are exchanged for cultural or artificial things like art or houses or bicycles.

The author of the post seems to be an extreme "primitivist" who somehow thinks we must completely walk away from civilization, technical or not, capitalist or not, and return to some primeval situation when there was no division of labor, no exchange of values, no development, no problem-solving, just some sort of mythical Garden of Eden when we plucked food from the land, ate, slept, and played music.

This is a total fantasy world that never existed, and never will exist. And thankfully so. Who wants to go back to this "imaginary paradise" of drudgery, back-breaking work, danger, and being at the mercy of a Nature that cares not a whit if we live or die, eat or starve. Who wants to go back to a time when life was nasty, short, and brutish (to use Hobbes' apt description)? Who wants to return to a dog-eat-dog, each person for themselves, do what you will when you will time prior to all civility, to all laws, to all organization of life? Who wants to reject all the great civilizers of history and pre-history? Who wants a time before art and music and laws and a reasonable expectation of breakfast?

The whole post is the rant of a sad mind. It has no merit and no attraction. It is, of course, one of the options that we have before us, but it is an option that deserves a thumbs down, absolutely and completely.

Many years ago I read War With the Newts published in 1936 by Karel Capek. I probably saw it recommended in a population or environment article but have also seen it interpreted in other ways. Is anyone familiar with this book?
--Capek also wrote RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) which is said to have given us the word robot.

When considering how we would like to change society I would encourage everyone to read Frans de Waal, and I would make one point: To avoid inbreeding humans (being flexible) have 2 strategies.

• Related women form the core of the group/village and young men leave to go to other groups. This works well for knowledge based societies, such as hunter/gatherer societies.
• Related men form the core of the village and young women move (with varying degrees of willingness) to live with strangers. This arises when there are physical assets to protect, like farms.

The former is much nicer for women and also for most men. Our gradual return to this mode is one of the things that makes modern life less brutal.

How WOULD we just walk away from the existing social and built infrastructure? Is it desirable? Is it possible?

Fortunately, life is self organising, as the social and built infrastructure collapses we will be FORCED to move in new directions. I bet that word FORCED really annoys a few fire demons out there, implying situations over which they have absolutely no choice or control, reminiscent of modern democracy.

In the shorter term, one needs to just keep minimising ones use of such infrastructure, eg, I should go and see the doctor for some pills but I'll put it off and suffer a little just to not use that part of the infrastructure, don't go to big mall supermarkets ever these days because that involves using a car and the associated infrastructure, ride a pushbike to the local food market. Yes, I know that trucks deliver the food to the local market but I withdraw my support in the few little ways i can manage, and as more people do so the system will automatically change to reflect the new "consumer behaviour profile".

Eating "End of Days Style" as my wife calls not going to the shops and scrounging in the garden for a "square meal" is another good way to cut down dependance on infrastructure. Vote with your feet - walk away from the system at every opportunity, the gradual method of drug withdrawal, baby steps and death therapy.

The implied massive dieoff from infrastructure collapse may have already begun with H1N1 Flu in Mexico, is it a coincidince that a state on the edge of collapse manifests a potential pandemic. No, Life is just organising itself. Where did I see the number, 1 degree Celcius rise in global temperature equals 15% drop in food production?, store water and plan for emaciation now.

Where does current trend extrapolation take us in 10 years, getting out from our protective closet of denial. Total global systemic collapse before 2020 is my guess.

"Humanity belongs to the Earth", is 100% self-evident outside of the deluded egomaniacal world of modern man, bet that annoys a few fire demons as they try to justify their non-axiom "The Earth belongs to Humanity".

The Earth may have even evolved Humanity to actually put all that carbon "back into solution in the air and water" as a means of resetting it's carbon cycle, now we've performed our planetary organic function we will probably dissapear.

Or do we still favour the "We will make it to the stars and populate the universe" daydream: God help the Universe.

I enjoyed the stark binary nature of the terms "Takers" and "Leavers", could almost make a new religion from them. Being a long time hobby student of comparitive religion I've just realised, with some amusement, that I have no idea what animism actually is, so that will be something to brush up on.

Gail posted "The Sermon on the Mount" about a month ago, for me that had a large bearing on "Takers" and "Leavers" thinking. It says a lot about our lack of faith does it not.

Time to start walking, starting new freindships with folks of the "sustainable" orientation would be a good next step for me, now that my garden is complete. Being retired and reclusive is getting boring anyway.

EXTRAPOLATE is the only advice I could offer. Play the PC game Fallout 3 if your mathematics is a bit dodgy.

I only wrote all this bull to let you know you are appreciated and that I am still reading TOD. Hope I have annoyed a few fire demons, any day that a fire demon is annoyed is a good day in my reckoning, so the rest of my life should be full of sunshine, until H1N1 gets as far as Australia.

Chuck writes:

Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment...We must develop a high enough level of group self reliance that will allow us to walk away.

This is wishful thinking. The mainstream culture has numerous defenses from abandonment, the most important being the taxation system. Why should we (I'm speaking as a representative of the mainstream) let you opt out of supporting the govt. when the rest of us have to? Everyone has unshirkable duties to the state, and that goes way back in time, long before fossil fuels appeared on the scene.

Tribalism is a failed form of social organization because it is militarily weak. The history of the US is a good case study, and there are thousands of other examples just like it going back to the Sumerians.

Sustainable "rhizome" societies are essentially groups of self-selected serfs, ripe pickings for taxation and threats by violence specialists from the "Taker" community.

The "Takers" destroyed and replaced the "Leavers" for very solid practical reasons, all of which are being glossed over here.

Has there ever been a stable society on this planet? One that didn't consume all it's resources and go raid next door when they ran out? I hear the Inuit were fairly peaceable; too many other things trying to kill you off to bother the neighbours. Of course they had a little cannibalism too, but only if there was nothing else in the fridge. How do we build something like that - that doesn't involve igloos?

It all seems rather pointlessly abstract. Suppose I agree with everything in the essay. What should I now do? "Look for new structures -" No, what should I do?

See, with my ideas, I can tell you what to do. Reduce, reuse, recycle; or if you want something longer, try the nine-point list in the one tonne CO_2e lifestyle. If you want more detail and numbers, you can become an apprentice housekeeper, with a five year plan to achieve it.

Perhaps Chuck Burr will tell me this is all futile. And that may be so, but it may not. But simply sitting around thinking abstract thoughts about 10,000 years of human history, and giving new meanings to old words like "culture" is definitely futile. I'll take possible failure over definite failure any day of the week.

Permaculture and transition towns are I think the best tools we have in stepping away from the abyss. That it does not magically and swiftly recreate the world of 10,000 years ago should not be used as an argument against them. While some eco-martyrs exist dreaming of die-off for the greater good, most sane people are concerned with their own survival first, and the long-term destiny of humanity second.

If someome has any better ideas that don't just come out sounding like an endorsement for die-off, I'd love to hear it. The time for "innovation" as Quinn puts it, has become quite short.

How could you not mention Prof. James Lovelock?
Gaia R us.
I am a walking colony. I am Gaia's brain and eyes. I am in the making.
I am an incomplete work.
A pity about the rest of you. Gaia's survival has a price.

I like the attempt to 'dig deeper' and try to answer questions about the very fundament of our social construct. Unfortunately I do not know enough about the Leavers to even try to participate in the discussion. Luckily there seem to be a few left:

Today, all but one or two million Leavers, versus of 6.8 billion Takers, are left alive or are not yet assimilated.

Who and where are these 1 or 2 million Leavers? (the San in Southern Africa? the Tuareg in Northern Africa (who are also matrilocal as the Minangkabau of Sumatra?) Are they as bloodthirsty and miserable as described in some of the discussion? how could we learn from them today? rolf_w

Ah, the old "neo-primitivist", "green anarchist" position is now stated so clearly and openly on the TOD boards.

I am glad. For awhile, it was disguised. If someone pointed out the ever stronger influence of the "neo-primitivist" philosophy on the Peak Oil movement, they were accused of being hysterical..."no, we have never said anything like that...." but as the modern techno culture refuses to break under the strain and instead continues to spread like a virus into every niche of humanity, the neo-primitivists are getting bolder, seeking anyone who will listen to them preach their message and infiltrating groups, the discussion boards and the media wherever possible.

This is the right of the neo-primitivists, but it goes without saying that they destroy the usefulness and credibility of any group they overtake, because they end all discussion of issues that concern any human born after some 4000BC plus. The above discussion is a great indication of this: If someone questions whether life was so great in the hunter gatherer societies, they can be instantly dismissed as having been educated by non-hunter gatherer societies!! Of course 99.8% of the human population was taught by post agricultural societies!! Thus, end of debate! Let's say it the way the author of the essay under discussion does:

"Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless."

And here we are, debating the undebatable! The discussion is over! We won (according to us!) you lost, take your ball and go home!

So I will not waste my time arguing with those who live in a world of faith in primitivist utopia (they are not new in the world by the way, this debate has gone on in the corners of the world for some 4000 years), but instead turn to a little detail that fascinates me:
Music. The author says,
"I am beginning to think we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods, and start making music for ourselves."

Thus, music seems to be about the only form of recreational activitiy allowed in this new "tribal" culture. But what kind of music will be allowed?

Remember that music can be a very dangerous thing. It starts out as a charming, comforting little chant or drumbeat, but before long ideas begin to creep in. Remembr Peter, Paul and Mary? Remember the crucial role that music played in the social revolution of the 1960's? But how can you control what ideas are allowed to creep into the music? Suppose that music begins to ask the same questions they did the first time around...questions about who is in power, why we cannot do better, live better, reach for the stars?

And if music is allowed, what about other arts? Painting, sculpture, heaven forbid, writing? Credit must be given to the great pioneer of the "back to nature", "noble savage" idea Jean Jacques Rousseau for understanding that the real danger was in the arts. The Soviet Union likewise understood the danger of writers, poets, artists and composers of music and attempted (without success) to control the arts. But what hope would a primitive tribe, deprived of the tools the artists can use (image, propaganda, variety and entertainment, an intuitive understanding of human psychology and an unstoppable creative impulse) of controlling the arts?

No, it cannot be allowed. If humans are to remain truly "primitive", they cannot be allowed to commit art. Music would have to be banned without exception, as would all other artistic activity. If not, the element of human power, will to power, liberty and achievement would creep back into the culture, and would spread by way of what seemed to be playful tunes and amusing pictures throughout the culture. A culture with arts to ask, to seek, to explore new possibilities could not long remain primitive.

The only way to contain the human impulse to change human destiny, to perfect the world, to CREATE is to stop all arts, all creative activity. To, in other words, create a non-human human.
"We had to destroy the village to save it." said the general in the Vietnam War. Thus, we must destroy humanity to save it.

RC

Have I really thought deeply about what how I feel about the "primitive" vs. the "modern" culture?

When I was about 12 years old, I was a boy scout. My troop and I once went on a 4 day camping trip.

Our scoutmaster was a very perceptive guy, an intuitive teacher. After about two days in the woods with what gear and tents we had, he asked the troop "Are you guys having a good time?" We all agreed we were.

He then asked us to imagine something: "Imagine this is it." He said. "Imagine that all you will have for the rest of your life is what you have with you and what these woods can provide. Do you think you would like it, do you think you could do it?"

It was an astounding concept for a group of 11 and 12 year old boys to try to deal with. After some discussion, we agreed that some of the guys could indeed make it. Soon enough we all agreed it would be a horrific fate compared to the life we knew back in a small southern town (a not so wealthy town at that)

In the woods, there was some animals and plants that could be killed and eaten, some fish in the streams. But, no cows, so no beef. Maybe some wild boars, so maybe something like pork. No refined foods, no ice cream, no cheesecake? No movies again EVER, no automobiles, no motorcycles, no music except what we could make, and it could not be recorded, no books or paper unless we found a way to make it...no wine or beer unless we could find a way to ferment it, which would require the birth of some type of small scale industry.

It is said that Einstien was once asked what the horrors of a nuclear war would entail: He thought for a few moments and said "Alas, we won't be listening to Beethoven anymore." I would add, or Miles Davis, or Janis Joplin or Janis Ian or Crosby, Stills and Nash or Patty Griffin. We would see no more of Picasso or Henry Moore or Mark Rothko.

This discussion is about SO MUCH MORE than the gadgets. Nations have sent millions to fight and die for less. Far less.

RC

Also a good read, Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
Since Nate is probably right in that we do *ALL* have the same culture, and it seems to be on a path to destroy our ecosystems it becomes essential to create a new paradigm.

However all past cultures have evolved without any planning, we are now faced with a situation where we can not wait for a new one to evolve if most of us are to survive. The question is can humanity design a completely new culture and civilization?

I agree that a great cultural change may be required, and that our relation with earth and ourselves is wrong. But we cannot simply get back to tribalism, not now... In order to go back to tribalism you require a very small population, using the resources of a large area.
With approximately 6,740,000,000 humans in a planet dry surface of 150,000,000 km2, you get 0.022255193 km2 per human. And this is considering deserts and barren places, the good land is 30% of this: it is impossible to "get back to tribalism".

Obviously the present system/culture cannot continue, it is not only resources but for biological reasons. Evolution dictates that any ecosystem is populated, and if no species exists to populate it, then one is developed. Consider now the biggest homogeneous and non-isolated ecosystem existing on earth for microbes: humanity.

Ok,,,I get it.

This is a Key Post that says essentially "TAKE NO PRISONERS"!

Meaning starting over , in some whatever way, and doing it right.

I would submit that in the past of this country ,the USA, there was a time and it lasted for quite a while , when things seemed to be DONE RIGHT.

I make a rather lengthy comment some weeks back and included some material I paraphrased from a book/s I read about this subject, as to how we(at least some of us) once lived.

The material I spoke of was pretty much the essence of what the Fox Fire series of books from around the 70s and perhaps some of the 80s.

It was started by a teacher named Wigginton in Georgia, IIRC, and entailed his students visiting the 'oldtimers' in that region who had not as yet passed away and gathering their very valuable information on how they once living in those older days and time.

This was information that was rapidly being lost. It covered several southern states most of which,but not all , were in the Appalachian Mts areas.

They were small communities which prospered and lived mostly sustainably for a long time and rather independently due to the lack of roads and highways and being passed over by the main culture and changes of capitalism and whatever was morphing into what we became later.

What did happen to change them was explained by one word. Capitalism.

The movements of the TAKERS. They took the land, they took the children, they took the resources, they took their culture away, they took their means and methods of living in a very beautiful environment and they began a process of destruction but CALLED it 'progress'.

LBJs program leaps to my mine. He visited there and seen a big political opportunity to shed money on them and gain political bullshit advantages. He made them wards of the state handout systems.
They were called 'happy pappys'. Once proud self-reliant folk and now turned into beggars for the federal handouts.

So if you want or wish to see how folks in this country conquered the wilderness and set up small functioning communities that were by and large self-sufficient then start reading the books of the Fox Fire Series.

They are still mostly in print and can be obtained usually on Amazon.

You will go back to the past before this huge movement of destruction and decay , named progress, started its engines of fate.

They are still roaring thru those mountains as I type. Still cutting the tops off mountains just to keep the Cappuccino cups full for the Yuppies and other of the worst ilk this country has ever produced.

Look at the faces of your ancestors in the book's photos and see the lines of hard work and a good life. They had little in the way of trinkets yet they lived and now are all dead. They tell us clearly how it once worked. They show us by written examples how. There are at least 12 books in the series. Its now part of the past but the work is still in existence.

It can work again. Not for everyone but for many. For those who desire it. Not those who just dream it. For those who have the desire to once more live with and close to nature. Not destroy it.

The author of this Key Campfire post has 'got' it,if I am reading it correctly. We have to do something then and just what is it? I suggest what we once had and lost. It can work on the plains of the prairies as well as in the Rocky Mts or the Smokies or even where I sit on my small patch of ground in Kentucky . A place I call home and try to hallow with my sweat equity.

Thanks for the article,
Airdale

I love your posts Nate... but I really don't like Quinn.. sorry...

Now I have to admit that I have not read his books... but I have attended our local "leavers" meeting and I have heard presentations on Quinns ideas.. multiple times.

My main complaint is that Quinn and followers seem to have idealized "leavers" to the point of compromising reality.

Your comment about war for example... Takers invented war? Come on... Foraging / hunter gatherer peoples have both inner and inter tribal warfare. If its not about food, or territory then its about women. Plenty of animals have wars, think of primates or even insects.

Another Quinn fallacy I hear quite often is related to marriage. Usually it goes something like.. "leavers were polygamous, it was the takers that invented marriage". This can be demonstrated to be false with minimal effort.

The Quinn followers I know have the same thinking patterns as fundamentalist Christians... they just have a different bible.

I think of Jared Diamond as an excellent alternative to Quinn. Diamond's ideas / opinions seem to be based on research... Quinns ideas... not sure... I tend to think he pulled alot of them out of his ass.

i am excited
cause i dont know the future. I think its too esay to say civilization is bad or good nor the future after peak oil will end in a collapse of our society or there is no such a thing like peak oil. Niall Ferguson " There is no future. There are only futeres." It is to linear to say after peak oil the civilication will collapse or at this rate of growth china will become economically more powerful than the USA in may be 2030. Yes one of this events may will happen on the point of view who made this conclusion. But i think to say such conclusions its arrogent cause u conclude it by finite datas u have collected. So u say such a conclusion and i say u sell me your opinion, because it isnt reasonable, yes its because u get a advantage of it when i believe your opinion, material or immaterial. So we got here why we were able so manage it so get so much energy per unit that we could built up this civilization. And i guess we need a minimum level on energy per unit so kepp the system running. In my conlusion when we are stupid enough not to manage it, The system planet will get rid of the most of us, so fast u cant imagine it. I am curious which future it will be.

Reading "Ishmael" was a turning point in my life. I took away an understanding of the shift in attitude toward the earth that occurred with the advent of agriculture. From "I belong to the Earth" to "The Earth (this plot of land) belongs to ME". This view is at the root of our cultural crisis.

Along similar lines, I would highly recommend American Mania: When More Is Not Enough" by Peter C. Whybrow, M.D. Written in 2005, the book analyzes the neuological and behavioral underpinnings of American overconsumption.

The late Vance Packard was one of my favorite writers during the 60's. He was not popular with the advertising industry.
--------------------------------------------------

Incomplete list of his booke copied from Wiki:
1957 The Hidden Persuaders - on the advertising industry - the first of a popular series of books on sociology topics (ISBN 0-671-53149-2)
1959 The Status Seekers - describing American social stratification and behavior
1960 The Waste Makers - criticizes planned obsolescence describing the impact of American productivity, especially on the national character
1962 The Pyramid Climbers - describes the changing impact of American enterprise on managers, the structured lives of corporate executives and the conformity they need to advance in the hierarchy
1964 The Naked Society - on the threats to privacy posed by new technologies such as computerized filing, modern surveillance techniques and methods for influencing human behavior
1968 The Sexual Wilderness - on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and changes in male-female relationships
1972 A Nation of Strangers - about the attrition of communal structure through frequent geographical transfers of corporate executives
1977 The People Shapers - on the use of psychological & biological testing and experimentation to manipulate human behavior
1983 Our Endangered Children - discusses growing up in a changing world, warning that American preoccupation with money, power, status, and sex, ignored the needs of future generations
1989 Ultra Rich: How Much I

From a biological perspective, the invention, or rather slow development, of a particular human activity, namely cooking, is what changed everything - life, the soil, now the climate- on earth, and forever.

When discussing what sets Man apart from other living organisms it is traditional to invoke language - communication and information transmission skills. We now know however that many animals possess ‘rudimentary’ symbolic skills, and that we are dealing with shades, degrees, types, rather than a clear-cut distinction (great apes, dolphins, elephants, etc.) and that other kinds of communication exist (e.g. through chemical trances, I mean traces, that was a real typo.)

We are the only animals that break down, transform, recombine, alter, food stuff and nutrients from the environment, outside of our bodies, with tools that are bodily extensions, and by harnessing energy other than sunlight. - Can’t think of one counter example.

These procedures have permitted us to become Mega-Omnivores, eating a huge number of things calorific.

- Certainly, poisonous mushrooms are not worth de-toxifying, Westerners don’t enjoy chewing on insects, we recycle grass which we can’t digest through animals, and can’t drink oil, make canapés out of lignite, or chomp on maple trunks.

One result: soon we will be 7 billion. Others: desertification, soil erosion and changes, extinction of multiple species, changes in others (dogs, corn) etc.

My knowledge of the ancient history of cooking is quasi non-existent, I mean to change that.

Aurignacians in France (Paleolithic) went beyond roasting spitted meat and invented steaming. Neolithic pottery spurred cooking techniques. Or arose because the local chefs wanted super pots, who knows. Grand historical leap: agriculture and sedentary life led to more storing, transformation, processing of food. Thereby stimulating trade...

I bring up this aspect as it is neglected, and the focus is always on agriculture, the tools, seeds, water / soil management, domestication of work / food animals, yields, as well as social organization that supported the expansion. If one thinks about it, none of that could have taken place without pre-existing knowledge or at least strongly supported ideas about the transformation of raw materials to efficient, healthy, tasty, socially accepted, food on the platter, in the hand, in the pocket.

Cooking used to be, and still is in many ways, small technology, as it traditionally carried out right at the bottom - a tribe of 15, a communal kitchen of 50, a family of 4...

To conclude, we are Takers but Transformers first. Cooking (plus associated techniques, like drying)

Seriously!

Agriculture was not invented to lock up the food source or to deliberately create a "taker" culture. Agriculture was a response to the first population crisis, where hunter-gatherer hominids became too efficient at what they did. Population swelled (though minuscule by today's standards) and the available surface area was not capable of feeding all the humans present. Agriculture was a crisis solution to a crisis problem. More to the point, WE CANNOT GO BACK!

Anyone who thinks we can benignly return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is... well, let's just say such people are completely delusional. That's as polite as I can get for such thinking. There are only two ways out of the current box - extinction or discover a new paradigm. None of the old paradigms are going to work. This is why it is vital that nation states collapse - it opens the way for many local survival experiments to begin. Most of them will fail, people will die and that's just natural selection at work. If all of them fail then we, as a species, are done. But all it takes is for one of them to find a new path, a new way, a new culture, and we (as a species) get another chance.

Going backwards is not an option here. Stop thinking about it because it will not happen. Hunter-gatherers, in a post-collapse world, will largely be hunted to extinction by their hominid competitors who will retain temporary advantages over the shorter term due to agriculture. Whatever new paradigm that arises must be superior to the agricultural one or it too will be destroyed. Nature is ruthless like this. Succeed or die.

I have no idea what the next successful culture will look like and neither does anyone here. All we can do is hope that enough attempts occur that one of them has a chance of finding a viable path, otherwise it's goodnight, ladies and gentlemen. I sort of hope that the next "culture" has more affinity with the biosphere than the current one does but that's not really what's important. My preferences are just my preferences. But please, don't waste time thinking that a shamanistic return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle will solve anything. It won't. Instead it will just ensure more dead hunter-gatherers.

As a creature of biology and evolution, the right answer is a moving target and in its specifics, unique to my situation. Quinn understood that there is no single answer and said so. The Quinn thinking had a profound effect on me (Diamond also), and contributed greatly to my abandoning a career devoted to making factories spew stuff faster at 24/7. I have never personally lived with paleolithic people, and I don't think Quinn did either, so inaccuracy or idealizing of their lifestyle is quite possible. I thought his strongest points were the need for new vision/mythologies to live by, the futility of "change the light bulbs" type programs to modify very deep rooted behavior, and framing the rules of natural life that we continually violate.
Our agricultural tribe has displaced (euphemism) the ones who knew how to live hunter/gatherer, so it is obvious we can't just spin around and go back there. This is a straw man and is not what Quinn suggests anyway. Our worthy ancestors precluded that choice for us, as we now preclude choices for our progeny (think easy copper, phosphorous, oil, etc).
We will have to grope our way forward, and for my part, I have chosen to walk away as much as I can from activities that are unsustainable, but without inordinately stressing those who rely on me for their daily food and security. We won't proceed to a better place as one single rapturous eco-village. We do need leaders who teach by doing.

The premise of Ishmael was not that we need to return to being hunter-gatherers, per se, but that prior to the "Taker" culture, many "Leaver" cultures existed side-by-side without imposing their viewpoint as being the only right way to live.

Of course we cannot go back to being hunter-gatherers. We don't have enough wild places left to support that without a huge population crash.

I believe what is needed is a mental rather than a physical or location shift.

We have a built environment already - we need to make do with that and not expand any further. People seem to have the notion that they ought to move elsewhere and build new environments for themselves - i.e. "We're moving to the farm".

Seems to me the only thing this will accomplish is further expansion by the "Taker" mindset.

What needs to be done is to start accepting that there is more than one "right way", and to make the mental shift that allows us to let other species live, even if they are our competitors.

A lot of over-simpification here, both in the article and the comments. Not EVERY tribe was successful; neither was every society warlike. Not all of civilization's outcomes have been positive, or negative either. There is a tendency to paint the picture in a way that supports the artist's point of view - well of course, that is the whole point of the creative process.

The hardest state of mind to acheive is neutral objectivity. This is because of the great difficulty humans have in 'forgetting' what we already know. It is not a lack of new ideas that defeats us but the stubborn tenacity of the old ones that refuse to be set aside.

It is always an error to judge human motives without acknowledging the circumstances that gave rise to them. Simple geography explains a lot more human history than you would expect. Recomended reading - "Collapse" by Jared Diamond.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4271982381147720351

I think that simplification of people's lives and letting go of the 'buying the junk of the moment' culture would be most useful for sustainable living, and great for improved mental well being.

However, I and many others do NOT wish to return to some idealized nomadic hunter-gatherer situation.

I concur in spades that the loss of great (and even lesser known but still unique and worthy of contemplation) paintings, sculpture, and music would be an awful loss for humanity. And I am not some homespun snob who only would wish to keep the art and literature and culture that I happen to like...we should keep it all. We can just see how certain folks, in the name of constrained resources and some BS 'return to (their definition of) decency would quickly advocate a good ole fashion book burning and taking the sledge hammer to nude statues that offend them.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't want anyone pre-selecting what is OK for me to behold, even if these actions are wrapped in some comfy blanket of a return to noble primitivism.

I would add to the list of things I would defend to be science knowledge. The day we stop receiving images and data from the other planets in our solar system and from the other bodies and structures in the cosmos, as well as from the depths of the ocean, that will be the day that our fire dies. We can have a reduced, then steady-state population level, without becoming pastoral naval-gazers.

If you want to do this, go sell your assets, buy some land in communal status, and live such as the Amish do. Perhaps your example would draw others, and more such communes would spring up. Has anyone though about joining a native American tribe and converting to their ways and using that as a way to return to simple, natural living? I'm not sure they would be amenable, they might first view such a movement as a final push by the white devils to invade and destroy their cultures. Perhaps visit their lands and learn from them...visit the Amish and learn from them...them strike out and try your luck. Just abandon your fantasies of making everyone else come with.

And as far as this flu thing goes...I can see that it is feeding the imagination of some of the more fervent doomers...

Kudos for the recommendation of Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach, but I should point out that as much Ecotopia lived in harmony with the planet, it was still a complex, technological society.

Excellent post, and excellent discussion. As expected, there are very divergent opinions here, but the discussion generated shows that this topic should be out in the open. You can call it primitivist or green anarchist or whatever (as one reader above commented), but it's certainly worth addressing.

For what it's worth, reading Quinn's "Ishmael" (interestingly, as a required reading in a capstone history course at the US Air Force Academy) was a definite turning point in my own intellectual journey. Most of what I've written since--from my book to my blog to my writings on this site--is an ongoing effort to integrate (and partially move beyond or disagree with ) Quinn's writing.

Primarily, I've been trying to reconcile my belief that Quinn has identified our most fundamental challenge, but that it is one that we simply can't (or at least won't) solve. What do we do? I certainly don't claim to have the answer, but my essay The Problem of Growth, here on TOD, was one of my more recent efforts to address the same fundamentals raised by Quinn.

As noted above, either you believe in limits or you don't. To the extent that we face limits to growth, we can only push our civilizational problems off onto later generations until we address the problem of growth itself. To that extent, I agree wholeheartedly with the guest-author, and with Quinn. I do think Quinn is overly limiting when it comes to discussing how to actually address the problem of growth, and it is certainly worth discussing symptoms of growth themselves, but we need to remember that they are symptoms. We need to remember that Peak Oil is a symptom, and that we cannot address this symptom in isolation and expect to "cure" the underlying cause...

Finally, one anthropological note: there's a lot of discussion above about violence inherent in human pre-history. People would be well served by learning about the anthropological taxonomy of civilizational forms: tribe; big-man group; chiefdom; proto-state; state. Everything beyond "tribe" represents the introduction of increasing hierarchy into the political order. While there are countless examples of violence, they are almost exclusively confined to those forms more complex than the tribe (the vast majority of civilizations with decent ethnological chronicles had already "advanced" beyond the tribal form). And be cautious not to confuse what is referred to as a "tribe" in popular culture with the anthropological taxonomy.

Did Chuck write the ending of Battlestar Galactica?

"Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow from what we can from the present that fits within the structure of the past. This is the only way we will make a difference. We have to become the change we want to see, find like minded friends, and start our own local tribes. We must develop a high enough level of group self reliance that will allow us to walk away. We need doers, not talkers, not surfers, and not bloggers. We need to be walking toward something better, not away from something we don’t like. Its time to start living your truth."

Excellent advice ... except that we cannot "create" a culture. Culture is emergent, rooted in how we live our lives, and only marginally under our control. If we commit wholeheartedly and in every aspect, root, stock, and twig, to living, as Burr says, "on local sunlight," a sustainable culture will emerge.

As regards like-minded friends and local tribes, a certain critical mass is, well, critical. Individuals or families, even large families, are not going to survive. It will take on the order of 150 persons, absolutely no fewer than 100, to survive on even a subsistence level. (H. sapiens [a misnomer: It seems to me we are still H. habilis, just clever, nowhere near wise] survived as a species in groups, despite what the neo-Darwinists want you to believe, and that's how we will survive in the future.) And I'm talking strict subsistence here - food, shelter, clothing - with none of the "amenities" we've become so fond of. (Lots of the back-to-the-landers of the '60s and '70s found this out, and suddenly discovered that a law practice or an MBA didn't look so bad after all.)

It's also critical that, in the words of Wendell Berry, we "divorce ourselves completely" from the dominant culture. To the extent that we depend on that culture for anything, to that extent we will share its values and its fate. I am as fond of many of the "amenities" as the next person; but I have learned, through my own bitter experience and the experience of many others, that it just doesn't work any other way.

My hopes for humanity, such as they are, now lie mostly with whatever few hunter-gatherers still live undisturbed, and with whatever few others who have made and will make the transition to "living on local sunlight." If you fancy yourself one of the latter, get moving now. Good luck, and godspeed.

"Going green is not enough. Driving a hybrid and having a backyard vegetable garden is not going to get you there."

Agreed.

"I am beginning to think we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods, and start making music for ourselves."

This doesn't seem very deep.

"However, they have no defense from abandonment. "

Dropout is common.there's skid row and . . ?

"But I do know that it has to go back to a level in which our population"

this is the crux , there is no other way of supporting 7 billion ppl sans ff.Organic farming ,permaculture,green every thing .electro cars, new cultural memes and all the other proposed solutions to the problems created by our earlier solutions are great but are only viable with a much smaller pop. so first order of biz is to depopulate 80% or so of humanity(suppose the oligarchs think down these lines?swine flu) and who has the courage for that?
One my fav quotes i picked up at TOD is"collapse is the solution"
AFTER collapse is the time for new ways paradigms .there is nothing to do but wait. after the dust settles and if your unlucky enough to be among the survivors then you can go about designing the the greater society eco sensitive ,permaculture and all the rest.
as you stated you need to go back thousands of years to understand the present.do you think you can avert what has been on its way for thousands of years?
"can't stop whats comin, the world aint waitin on you, that's vanity "

Chuck's essay is oddly authoritarian in tone, even totalitarian, or dare i use the now meaningless adjective in an admittedly rhetorical way ... fascist? due to recent (in the last five minutes) bouts of hyperbole wafting through the room (which probably came from the same room in which Chuck was writing this essay), i want to say: dudes, i'm down with quinn and primitivism and green anarchy and whatever, but what's with the Khmer Rouge-style beating-over-the-head with Dangerous and Unruly Nostalgia for Monolithic Past Realities here?

Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution when they locked up the food, began the population–food race, invented war, started privatizing land, and ended the formerly one universal religion of animism.
(...)
Nothing will change for our children until our culture ends.
(...)
Discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless.
(...)
The problem began 10,000 years ago when our culture was created.
(...)
The only solution worth discussion is developing new cultures that live by the original story that humanity belongs to the earth.
(...)
We need doers, not talkers, not surfers, and not bloggers.
(...)
We need to implement a peasant utopia according to my strict specifications and kill all the intellectuals, easily recognizable by their glasses [ok, I made that up, as well as the emphases above, to make a point]

i understand and appreciate the sense of urgency, and the desire to somehow induce people to start taking Life seriously, BUT this type of hysterical exclusion of possibilities is counter-productive - as can be seen in the comments. those already familiar and on board with Quinn-type radicalism were amenable; those not, were typically not. totally understandable, both sides. this essay was not one capable of changing minds or inspiring (except by accident, or through the conversation it engendered, if other brighter minds happened to have read it). why? apart from lack of nuance, poetry, and historical accuracy - i think it fails to open up space for free exploration of possibilities. there were a lot of only, only, only's, and no, no, no's. what about asking sincere questions? (if Chuck had included yours, Nate, in the essay, it would have been radically different ...) what about sketching artistic visions of future possibilities, in the hopes that other artists are inspired, and can collaborate? we need to develop a genre of talking about The Crisis that is productive, rather than violent and empty.

to move beyond aesthetics for a moment - Chuck's definition of culture is lacking. he seems to think culture consists in a trans-national mythological survival meta-strategy: taking. that's like calling terrorism an ideology; terrorism is a method, and there are many ideologies for which terror, the method, has been used. taking (in Quinn's mythological sense) is a method. not everyone is a Taker for the same Monolithic Reason; for example, maybe someone had a traumatic childhood in Haiti, and now loves the excesses of New York, because he's escaping childhood trauma ... it makes him feel safe ...

i'm with those who purport a sort of computational metaphor for culture. ecosystem + body = hardware; culture = software. culture is the set of algorithms - stored in the "memory" of arts, religions, traditions, methods, habits, techniques, languages (in short, all that which can be transmitted from one generation to the next) - whose purpose it is to allow the hardware to make a go of it in Life.

so how about questions like: How can we reprogram ourselves? How can we reprogram others? What is the basis for radical software updates in the human mind (sometimes called "conversion" or "paradigm shifts") - and is there a way to make this phenomenon more pervasive? is there an upper limit on this? i praise all the educators, and the artists, and the educator-artists, and the writers, and yes, even the bloggers that Chuck hates & thinks we should dispose of ... for they are exploring questions like these, and making paradigm-shift possible. i praise all those like Airdale who are creating real-world examples of countercultural sustainability. this, too, is art and education, the stuff of reprogramming ...

and as far as concrete actions ...Chuck recommends depaving and getting rid of iPods. what about if we started a fad, and used social esteem to good effect, and made it viral, and spread it across the internet, that your coolness and authenticity as a human being is represented by how many plants you can plant ... we're talking just going absolutely overboard and excessively planting, like there's no tomorrow ... that would solve many current problems, as well as currently unanticipated ones (how do I know?)

i haven't eaten much today, forgive the low blood sugar-induced incoherence, and the rampant hypocrisy for being just as Totally Certain as Chuck ...

It sounds to me like this guy Burr thinks we need to have a cultural revolution, as in Mao's Cultural Revolution. Well, we all know how that one turned out.

......you can count me out.

The opening statement "political dicusssions... media coverage ..far too shallow" should be engraved in stone above the doors of every newspaper every where. I rarely find an article in print or online that really pursues any issue to it's logical conclusions or FAIRLY presents the point of view of more then one or maybe two of the many many different groups of people involved in big issues.The free marketers and globalizers cheerleaders are extraordinarily good at convincing us that moving our industries overseas is good for us,and even better at dismissing the misery of the people who lose their jobs as a result with a few blithe remarks about retraining and n ew opportunities.
We let them get away with this because the vast majority of us ae either too lacking in critical thinking skills and factual information or else too busy too be bothered with really thinking things all the way thru.We have lost tens of thousands of jobs in my area over the last few years that paid livable and sometimes very good wages- jobs that were held in many cases by people severely lacking in the skills needed to obtain a new job paying anywhere near as well.There is not news of course,the shallow media covered it very well.
We have not seen probably 10 percent as much coverage of some of the results.A functionally barely literate young man who can get an industrial job(driving a forklift,etc) that pays well enough to support a family will support a family in most cases.When such jobs disappear,he is much more likely to abandon his family,or turn to "dealing" a little on the side to make ends meet, or both.The positive feedbacks kick in, and as the tax base declines the need for social services grows dramatically.The bueracracies put in place to deal with the problems are virtually always going to pursue programs much better designed to perpetuate the bureaucracy than to solve the problem because of course survival is THE imperative.The result is more positive feedback once again as the voting booth power of the people either on the public payroll or dependent upon a govt subsidy contonues to grow.
The sort of folks who read the Oil Drum are likely to be aware of such feedback loops and thier consequences,of course, and could undoubtedly describe hundreds more.My point is that the typical person on the street has given almost no thought to my example,or to any that you may care to name.I could extend my example a little farther to help comment on the irony of the fact that the feedbacks have grown to the point that quite a few of the free trade/globalists,not to mentionthe ordinary citizen, have lost their shirts over the last year or so.There used to be a voter referred to as a "Reagen Democrat", but I fear that the destuction of his economic environment has driven his spieces to the brink of extinction.

The post regarding Diamond being inaccessable to the average reader is right on if by average reader you mean about 80 or 90 percent of the population.Does anyone remember the story about the professor in Vermont(?)who couldn't understand how Mondale could have lost,since every body he knew voted for him?
We have economists telling us how to run the world who apparently have never completed a course in the basic physical sciences at the college level.I know dozens of well educated(well they have degrees from accredited in institutions anyway)people. Most of them don't know diddly about biology, chemistry,goelogy,etc.Diamond is an incredibly good scientist and a VERY good writer, and makes his arguments well.I expect that he will be remembered in a century (assuming we're still around)as one of the most important writers of his time.
The PROBLEM with his accessibility to even this so called educated reader is that even though the reader may be able to follow the reasoning he will not take it seriously, because he hears and sees too many conflicting arguments.Lacking the basic knowledge of the physical sciences necessary to come to an informed judgement,he waffles and generally comes down on the side of cornucopians/globalists/bankers etc because they flood the information market with their message-which is not by the way necessarily a bad or false message in many respects.They wouldn't be able to dominate the world in the current fashion otherwise.I'm glad folks in the third world can have schools and refrigerators as a result of globalization bringing growth to their local economies, for instance.
Now as far as the average man on the street is concerned,he never reads a serious book any way.I doubt that much more than 40 percent of our population could even read Diamond's work without the assistance of a dictionary and a tutor.I am incidentally a former teacher of agriculture and well acquainted with the realities of our schools.
The only firm conclusion I can draw from my thinking along these lines is that whatever programs are put in place as the economy and the environment continue to unravel are more likely to be decided upon based on how well they work as sound bites than how well they will really work.

Humanity has lived on the earth for three or four million years. For millions of years we lived in harmony or symbiosis with the ecosystem.

In a word, bullcrap.

For two or three million years, our ancestors lived in tiny groups on the brink of extinction, and indeed many of the groups related to our ancestors in fact went extinct. All of these groups were "takers", but some of them didn't figure out how to "take" well enough to survive. All of these groups tried their best to increase their numbers as much as possible. None of them ever said to themselves "we should take less, and not increase our numbers, so we live in harmony with the planet." Those that failed to increase their numbers simply failed, not because they didn't try.

I'm referring to all human ancestors prior to homo erectus, which got good enough at taking that they were able to spread out of Africa (according to the most accepted theory) and begin effecting ecosystems on a planetary scale. By this point, we were already on the road to destruction of ecosystems and the consequent pressure to develop agriculture to feed a larger population. These groups and those that followed them almost certainly hunted many large fauna species to extinction. It is essentially certain that in many localized situations, they overshot their resources and died in famine. It is simply false to say that prior to agriculture (or even before that) humans had a "leaver" culture which did not alter the ecosystems they lived in, to their own detriment or that of other species.

(If hunter gatherer societies believed that "man belongs to the earth", it's surely because such folks still felt like their species was on the brink of survival; I'm sure many of them were eaten by tigers or had their entire families wiped out by drought or typhoon. But that doesn't change the fact that they killed more tigers than vice versa.)

I suppose it is possible that as a whole human species, around the world, we can make a social compact with each other to stop increasing our global population (and allow it to decrease by some amount) such that we might truly live in harmony and symbiosis with the planet, meaning that over the long term we don't take more from it than we give back, and vice versa. (It would mean, as a beginning, that everyone around the world would agree not have more than two children.) But neither we nor any other species that has ever lived on this planet has done that before. Every species, including us, has grown when it was able to grow, and shrunk when it was not able to grow. We are in fact the first species to have lived on this planet among whom some individuals have been able to come up with abstract idea that stability - the real meaning of "harmony and symbiosis" - might be desirable.

I sympathize with the goals of the author here, but if we were to invent a "leaver culture" that would be something entirely new to natural history. And it would mean maintaining - or rather building - a global culture capable of maintaining the non-growth social compact everywhere and teaching it to children everywhere. Giving up or losing global civilization may allow the earth to heal itself, for a time and in certain places, and refresh ecological resources for subsequent civilizations to feed on again. But eventually we will end up back on the same road we are on now.