I just listened to an interesting lecture on Anarcho-Primitivism from a YouTuber who calls himself B Kane. Fascinating to learn about a discourse within which Ted Kaczynski is a comparatively sane and reasonable voice.
The basic argument of the anarcho-primitivists is that because civilization imposes myriad restrictions upon us, we should give it up and go back to being hunter gatherers. Other anarchists, they think, are foolish in thinking that modern technology is compatible with real freedom. I agree with this; I think that to imagine building airplanes or a health care system without rules and hierarchies is just nuts. Our way of life, especially the disciplined middle-class existence that is at the center of our world, absolutely depends on following millions of rules, many of them laid down by credentialed experts. I agree that in some ways our lives are less free and less under our control than those of many hunter gatherers.
But.
I have many, many freedoms that hunter-gatherers never had. Including the freedom to explore weird philosophical ideas that nobody I know personally understands. I cannot see how freedom at this basic level exists on a sort of sliding scale; on the contrary, proclaiming one kind of freedom necessarily implies giving up some other freedom.
I often question techno-anarchists along the same lines: your world of voluntary cooperatives takes away my freedom to live in a capitalist world governed by cash transactions. I would really rather not have personal relationships with the people who supply my lettuce and my electrical power. So far as I can see, exchanging the power of capitalist relations for the power of face-to-face communes gives no advantage to me.
Seeking maximum freedom is self-contradictory. Balance is the best we can do.
Besides, I think that reason and imagination are lousy ways to design a good place to live. The only way I think has any validity is empiricism: look around the world at the places people want to live and see what they have in common. And that is: representative democracy; large, powerful states; and mixed economies. You may find one or all of those systems stupid or immoral, but the fact is that the countries fighting to keep people out all have them.
But.
I do wonder sometimes if the bizarre dissatisfaction of so many contemporary people with our wealthy societies comes from the anarcho-primitivist parts of our brains. We evolved to live in band-level societies with very narrow cultures and simple technologies, and maybe our huge, diverse nations full of mysterious machines just mess with our brains.
2 comments:
In the 1960s, a British zoologist called Desmond Morris wrote a book called 'The Human Zoo'. The central thesis was that a lot of the aberrant or unusual behaviours seen in humans can also be seen in animals, particularly primates, kept in zoos.
Objectively, most zoo animals have better lives than their wild counterparts. They never need to worry about starvation, drought, parasites, disease, predators, or injuries. Newborns are vastly safer, and the sick and older animals receive medical intervention instead of being picked off by predators. Because of that, they live much longer lives in captivity.
Yet zoo animals often act as if they are unhappy, for want of a better term, even harming themselves or other members of their group.
Morris argued, I think to some extent fairly, that innate behaviours that are adaptive (useful) in the wild become frustrated in captivity, and this leads to what we would describe as bad behaviours such as aggression and self-harm. The animals may be safer and healthier, but they aren't necessarily 'happier'.
I think the parallels with urban life are obvious. As you correctly observe, modern wealthy societies allow people to express themselves in all sorts of ways they couldn't if they were tied down by the need to farm or forage for food all day long. By any objective metric we have it better than someone living in a Neolithic settlement like Chatalhoyuk.
What a lot of us don't have, though, is meaning. Someone in Chatalhoyuk would know everyone around them, if they did a good deed knowledge of that would quickly be shared, and when they needed help their neighbours would all be aware. They would be wired into their little society, and for good or for bad, their worth as a person would be common knowledge.
Compare that to a big city today where many people feel isolated. They create online communities to replicate human connections, but at the end of the day, that's never going to be as fulfilling as a network of real people you can see and touch. Our labour, our merit, might be apparent to our line manager, but how often do any of us feel valued at work? Fairly or otherwise, capitalism focuses on the productivity of the employee in terms of monetary value created, not in emotional fulfilment.
Academics are luckier than most in that their job allows them to follow through on things they care about, and the things they're creating in terms of learned papers or book chapters are expressions of that curiosity that their peers will review (and hopefully praise). As you say, you get to think and read and write and talk about things that have meaning to you.
Most of us don't work in a world like that, and if you're asking why people in cities aren't as happy as their material wealth should imply, I think it comes down to that. Most people work in jobs that aren't fulfilling beyond paying the bills.
A) Animals in zoos do not choose to be there. In fact, they have to be actively prevented from escaping. But people flock to cities in droves of their own volition.
B) "Many people feel isolated" in rural areas too. In fact, it's the biggest and best-known factor in the centuries long (millennia long?) trend of rural communities bemoaning that all their young people are leaving for "The Big City". If people are happier outside of cities, why have they so consistently and so desperately wanted to leave the proverbial farmstead for so very long?
C) Ignorance isn't really bliss, but there's something to be said for people's ability to endure something awful if they believe they have no choice. If you're poor and ignorant, you tend to resign yourself to the hardships of life because you don't know that things could be any different - it's "just the way things are". You're not really "happier", but you certainly complain less.
But once you experience different ways of thinking and living, and suddenly have options made available to you, things change. You develop desires you never would have previously, because you didn't know such things were possible. And in contrast, you are "unhappier" because you KNOW there's more to life possible, and yet most people are denied access to such things because of the demands of society and limited resources, and it's a tragic thing to realize and cope with.
Post a Comment