Perspekxxtive

I hate to turn this blog into an "all talking about primitivism, all the time" blog. It's not, really, but something happened yesterday that made me think about it differently. I was hanging out with my friend Ben in the room of two of his friends. I got to talking with this one guy about primitivism. The thing was, when I was talking my point of view, I couldn't seem to come up with many arguments to go against him. After I came back to my dorm I realized that this wasn't just because I tend to freeze a little bit while talking, needing more time than some people to collect my thoughts, but also because when I was talking with him, I had to reconsider the premises I already considered obvious. This guy is a singularitarian - someone who believes that in not too long, the curve of technological growth, already curving upward in exponential growth, will reach a "singularity", where the growth is close enough to a vertical that it will effectively be infinite and we can do anything.* Having loved nature all my life, I had to really adjust my thinking before I could say anything that would make sense to someone who thinks the measure of mankind's progress is the degree to which it controls its environment (controlling its environment is inescapably a euphemism for destroying nature). And I had to really adjust when I heard him say that "any species that's worthwhile would survive without our help anyhow." (To which I replied, "If I shoot you with a gun, it must mean you weren't worthwhile enough to survive, right?" - And he said that what we're doing to animals is totally different, I guess on the basis of the fact that we aren't doing it literally with guns. Actually we are, at slaughterhouses with special slaughtering guns, but that's beside the point, which is that he's completely wrong.) That's when I realized that I need to write something that deals with primitivism specifically geared toward someone who would dismiss it out-of-hand and can't see how it might not be ridiculous. Because that's the kind of person that a whole lot of people in the world are. Quite possibly some of the people reading this.
-So, the first question is: What do you gain from going back to a primitive way of life?
This question is unnecessary except in our upper-crust part of society. The vast majority of people in the world are extremely poor and would, when viewed even from our upper-crust perspective, have been better off if civilization hadn't arisen. But in America, it takes a little examining to convince people that hunting and gathering wouldn't be the same as eternal misery in squalor. The first thing I'd like to point out is that in bushmen societies of Africa - these are societies in the desert, where life is pretty difficult - the members only need to work about two or three hours a day on average in order to find their subsistence. Their neighbors who have been convinced to grow food instead are effectively enslaved to their farms, because the farms take so much work. After I said this, the singularitarian just said, "What do they do with all that extra time?" When I told him that they bond with each other and generally have a great time together, he said he'd rather be working, so he could make better machines, because he views that as play, not work. I doubt he'd say the same in practice. He'd be among the innumerable who wish they could spend more time with their family, especially their kids (though he seems like he might not be the having-kids type), if only they didn't have to do so much work.
-Here's another question. He talked about working every day so that he could make something that's better than it was yesterday. You couldn't do that living in the jungle, could you? It's a pretty romantic notion: continual improvement through smarter machines. But who defined machines as the meter of "better"? From my perspective, continual improvement would be learning each day to cooperate better with nature so that nature and I can both live more comfortably. Eventually, I'd get to a point where I wouldn't improve much anymore - but the difference between me and him is that I'd then be satisfied that I'd at last gotten to where I need to be, and didn't need to keep trying to improve, whereas he would never be satisfied and is always working toward a continually receding goal.
-Well what about my hypocrisy? Obviously I'm not sincere, since I haven't already gone out and started living in "the jungle" (for some reason he always called it that, even though I'd be living in North America and it'd be called a forest), right? And likewise, Derrick Jensen can't possibly think his arguments are valid, because he hasn't abandoned civilization yet - in fact, he's used civilization to distribute the books he writes.
Well, no, because I was raised in civilization and never got hands-on training with any of the techniques I need to know in order to live off the land. I can't yet go back into the wild and survive, probably. Once I can, I still won't for a while, because for one thing, a society of one is depressing and vulnerable, and I'd need to find some people who would come with me. I'm most likely to find those people here, or through the internet. Civilization has kept people with ideas like these from growing up together, but fortunately we can now use civilization in order to get back together. And as for writing books, Derrick Jensen has done more good for the natural world by raising awareness about primitivism through his books than he would have if he had just gone off and started living in the redwood forest. As long as civilization is still around, it helps if you can work against it, not just leave it. It helps you (by increasing the health of the landbase you're living on) and it helps the rest of the world.
-So, thanks for bearing with me. If you have any questions, just ask them: that can only make this post more valuable.

*Singularity is a pretty idiotic doctrine, as far as I've been able to see. It ignores the fact that every other curve that has had exponential growth has slowed down to become a logistic growth curve. (Actually, I just read that the main proponent of it knows technological growth will become logistic, but has decided it's going to happen too far in the future to matter to him.) And the reason that we're going to be able to disobey this law is that, as the guy in the dorm said, "We're smarter." He went on to mention several benchmarks of our smartness like the understanding of DNA and the making of computers, asking rhetorically if any other culture has understood those things, and acted like that proved our superiority and our capability of hitting a Singularity. But notice that any previous culture could have said that about cultures that didn't have their technology ("Has any other culture been able to use a springy stick and some string to shoot a pointy stick so fast that an animal can't run away from it?") and any future culture that advances farther than us could say it about us ("Has any other culture been able to make all the molecules of an object become energy and then reconstitute again at a distant point?") and argued just as successfully that their culture alone is fit to achieve singularity. So, no singularity.

What what what what!

The title of this blog is taken from here. Mouse over the dialog box.
Anyhow. What's been going on? Well, it's been a pretty tame year so far. I've been doing pretty well in all my classes, though I had a rocky bit where I confused my sociology with my anthropology. I might register for a Russian class, but that would put me at 20 credits, and you need special permission to go over 18. And maybe you have to pay... I'll ask about that tomorrow at some point. I've been organizing a croquet tournament through the athletic department (which is why it's spelled with a q: they want me to offer flat and all-terrain varieties). People are supposed to register by the 21st; so far I've had one person register, so I'm going to be publicizing the thing a lot this week.
-I've been reading a ton of bookage. I read the monumental and incredible and necessary Endgame by Derrick Jensen. Then I read The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg; it's about peak oil. The next one I'm reading is Njál's Saga, an Icelandic saga, because for English we just read Beowulf and I was kind of in a saga mood. After that I'm going to start reading about Plains Indians, to see how they lived. I know about what happened to the Natives after Europe came on boats, but I know much less than I'd like to about what they did before all that. So I'm going to start reading extensively on Natives. There's like several square yards about them in the library, so I've got plenty to choose from.
-Tenzing is doing fine, and currently relaxing in my sleeve; I fed him at Aaron's Bible study thing on Wednesday and some of the people from it watched and said it was pretty cool. I found a great climbing tree, probably the best I've ever known, on the lawn (we call it a beach, because we don't get real beaches) in front of this year's dorm. I can climb up some 35 or 40 feet on it, above the JRC roof - sometime I'll have to get a tape measure or a clinometer and measure it. I'm waiting for a train to go by in the daytime so I can climb up in the tree and take this awesome shot I have lined up, of the train going by far beneath, and some students waiting for it at the sidewalk crossing. Once I get the shot, I'll post it here. Generally, then, everything's pretty good here, except that I've run out of ginger snaps.
-But it looks like things are doing less well in the world at large. This is old news integrated with the new, but combined take a look at the picture it creates. Bear Stearns collapsed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed. Lehman Brothers collapsed. Merrill Lynch collapsed. AIG may be collapsing. Washington Mutual has been acting funny. All right? And then, there's Hurricane Ike, which just temporarily disabled our oil supplies. Ford, GM, and Chrysler have all announced that they'll probably need a (nother) federal bailout in the future. In Nigeria, MEND has bombed pipelines. All sorts of crazy stuff is going down. The Wall Street Journal has compared this to the Great Depression. But, when we hit the Great Depression, discovery of oil was still rising rapidly. Our discovery of oil peaked in 1960; our extraction of oil is peaking right now. So this new economic paradigm we're going into - and that's not an exaggeration; CNBC for one is saying it - is going to be a whole lot harder to burn our way out of when we don't have enough oil. It looks like something very big is happening. But what do you all think?

Today is the day

that I feel like a real snakekeeper. I'd been suspecting that maybe Tenzing shedded without my noticing, because he didn't look all dull anymore. So last night I took out one of the frozen pinkie mice I bought in Davenport, and warmed it up by hand. (It ended up sticky to the touch, which I wasn't expecting.) Aaron was sleeping, so I opened the cage lid quietly. No sooner had I bumped Tenzing's nose with the mouse than he took it instantly and silently (only making a sound as he fell to the floor with it). I sat and watched him swallow it, although I could barely see either of them. Within a few minutes, he had gotten it down his throat and gone back to wandering around the cage like he usually does at night. As of now he's sitting on his branch under his hide, digesting. Next week I'll take a video of him striking and post it so you all can watch. It's pretty awesome.
-Other stuff: classes are going fine. I think I like all of my classes this semester. I've only had a couple sessions of each, of course, but they seem pretty good. (For reference, they're intros to sociology and anthropology, Spanish 217, and English Trads. 1 - that is, early English literature. In that one we'll be reading stuff like Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and such.)
-And Aaron just a few minutes ago told me that several people from college frequent my blog, like a guy named Matt downstairs. Well if you read, by all means you don't need to keep it a secret. Leave a comment if you want. I kinda like knowing who's reading what I write.