John Zerzan first shot into celebrity philosopher status in 1995 after the New York Times featured him in 1995 as a supporter of the Unabomber's anti-technology doctrine. He has since become a leading light of the primitivist movement in the US. In an exclusive interview with DNA, he explains why modern civilization is fundamentally anti-human, 'green' technology is 'psycho' and Stone Age is the way to go.
American philosopher John Zerzan's thesis is simple: civilization is pathological, and needs to be dismantled. Zerzan's radical critique of civilization, laid out in books such as Elements Of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), and Running On Emptiness (2002) draws on anthropological research to argue that domestication of nature and domestication of humans go hand in hand. And this is accomplished primarily through technology. According to him, the dystopia of the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix trilogy is already here: the technological-industrial 'machine' is already running the world, a world where individual humans are but insignificant little cogs with barely any autonomy. No single human being - neither the most powerful politician, nor the most powerful businessman - has the power to rein in the system. They necessarily have to follow the inexorable logic of what has been unleashed. He believes that the climate change summit in Copenhagen is a joke, and environmentalists are too superficial in their critiques to make a difference. In an exclusive interview, the California-based Zerzan, who was in Mumbai recently for a lecture tour, talks about why going back to the primitivism of the Stone Age is the only meaningful 'green' alternative.
Your work has been described as 'anti-civilisational'. Are you seriously against civilisation?
Of course. Anti-civilisational thought draws attention to the nightmare that's unfolding right now. It asks some basic questions that haven't been asked. It tries to change the subject away from the manoeuvring on the surface of dominant systems, in favour of going to the roots of it, and posing alternative directions, alternative projects, on a very basic level. I mean, here we are, as a species, and we can't breathe the air. What more do you have to say?
You mean you're being literal when you say we have to go back to the Stone Age?
Absolutely, otherwise it's just talk. We have to dismantle this whole mess, and start thinking practically, start regaining the skills we once had as people on this planet. We're just becoming more and more dependant on technology, which drains everything away - it drains community away, it really drains experience away, it drains meaning away.
So how does one get back to the primitive way of life?
The first step is to have a chance to raise questions like these - beyond the fraud of politics and parties and bullshit that never really challenge anything but only guarantee that things get worse, by avoiding the primary stuff. Nothing's ever going to change unless there is a chance for people to become engaged on a level of discussion that is meaningful, that really does question this path of technology-led 'progress', and why we are on this path, and what drives this.
So what brought us to this path in the first place?
I would say it goes all the way back to division of labour, domestication, and the rise of symbolic culture.
What about division of labour?
It is with division of labour, and the consequent growth of inequality and estrangement from the earth and from each other that you see, coincidentally or not, the emergence of symbolic culture. Symbolic culture dates back to before domestication and agriculture, but it established the ground for domestication to occur. The rise of division of labour in primitive society also marks the beginning of stratified society, and it appears to emerge fairly suddenly in the Upper Paleolithic era [45,000 to 10,000 years ago] just before domestication.
Without symbolic culture and language, would we be still be human?
Well, if you define it that way! Today 'being human' means, very symbolic, if not totally symbolic, although that's been pushed back, too. It was thought that about 60,000 years ago, you had homo sapiens sapiens [the modern humans]. But today the consensus is they appeared 200,000 years ago. Here we're already moving back out of the symbolic, which is interesting, as it has implications.
What kind of implications?
For example, we define intelligence as our skill in manipulating symbols, but that's not the only way, and why do we define it that way? Because ours is a fully symbolic culture, and to get around in it and achieve things in it, you have to do these things: you have to know the math and everything else. But in a world where you don't have that, intelligence means something else, and there is obviously intelligence before the symbolic. Given that we weren't symbolic a million years ago, and Thomas Wynn and other anthropologists say we had the same level of cognitive development then as we do today, it certainly wasn't applied to symbolic projects or symbolic culture - there is no evidence whatsoever that early humans applied their intelligence to symbolic projects. So how can you say we're not human unless we're symbolic?
All that is great and grand about humans, would they have been possible without symbolic culture?
That's just the dominant way of looking at it. For example, if you look at art, religion and so forth as compensations and consolations for what is lost in modern civilisation, then it doesn't seem so fabulous any more. In fact, its giving us less and less I think.
Comments
