lunedì 31 marzo 2014
It’s Time to Disorganize!
from Green Anarchy #6
If there’s anything that the failures of the left, particularly the unions (from the UAW, AFL-CIO, to the IWW), it’s that any ‘revolutionary’ theory that doesn’t question the key elements of civilization is going to do nothing more than shift the social order to a slightly ‘modified’ version. That is if they work at all. We can no longer look to any kind of reform for an end to the death machine that is civilization. It has long been an embedded idea in ‘revolutionary’ strands that success requires organization. The age-old calls of the Wobblies, “It’s time to organize!” are ringing hollow as the leftist milieu grinds them into the pages of dead social movements in radical history. What has our past of ‘organization’ brought us? We can say that it has brought us some success because those at the top of the newly created social hierarchies tell us we have. Organization pushes us back into the same top-down hierarchies that we are trying to revolt against and erase. What will this bring us? Goodbye old boss, hello to the new, any difference? Maybe there’ll be a mild greening (or Redding more likely), but it’s still the same social order, which generally is unquestioning of destructive civilized lifestyles. But even in the short run they offer little more than pushing forward new leaders to tell us how and when to act out and how and when we’ve won. It’s getting us nowhere. Little, lefty reformist games comprised of a lot of talk and no action. ‘Consensus’ meetings held behind closed doors by chosen or predetermined delegates will layout the guidelines of how much reform the masses will stand behind. We have no choice in the matter and don’t realize the two-faced realities of those disposing of empty rhetoric. It has not and will not get us anywhere.
If we do truly desire an end to the civilized social order, we can only do so by enacting insurgence and revolt by means that keep no aspect of the current social order, or push for a system that mirrors this. The only hope we have is for spontaneous acts of revolt to come from the passions and rage of individuals. No top down orders or ‘plans for action’ can wake the insurgent drowned out by the totality of civilized thought.
The only true and successful revolution will not be brought about by predetermined games of give, give, borrow, silent marches and banners, and especially new hierarchies. It will come from the hearts of those who bear the blows of civilization (which is all of us, including non-humans). Those whose dreams are shattered, those who will never life autonomously, unrestrained from the totality of the civilized concrete cages we are born into. Those who have been shut off at birth from their birthright to flourish as individuals and a community, and from the community of Nature that would offer them more love than we can conceive in our current downtrodden state. The failures of all hierarchies are becoming clearer daily. The constant collapse of the social order from it’s overbearing weight will draw more to find their catalyzing points, and thus to their own revolts. Insurgence is rising, and civilization is falling. Give it the final shove by using your own words and actions. Breaking the spell of civilized order is the only way to finish off Leviathan, and everyday is bringing us closer.
-Kevin Tucker.
Agriculture by John Zerzan
Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was originally encountered as time, language, number and art won out. As the materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of estrangement and the definite divide between culture and nature and humans from each other.
Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine. “To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to efface its irregularities and banish its surprises,” these words of E.M. Cioran apply perfectly to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as mainly sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of separated life. Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself. Historical time, like agriculture, is not inherent in social reality but an imposition on it. The dimension of time or history is a function of repression, whose foundation is production or agriculture. Hunter-gatherer life was anti-time in its simultaneous and spontaneous openness; farming life generates a sense of time by its successive-task narrowness, its directed routine. As the non-closure and variety of Paleolithic living gave way to the literal enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and came to take on the character of an enclosed space. Formalized temporal reference points — ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of days, etc. — are crucial to the ordering of the world of production; as a schedule of production, the calendar is integral to civilization. Conversely, not only would industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the end of agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of historical time.
Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire. By displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and brought under strict control; all direct, unmediated experience is subsumed by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language. Language cuts up and organizes reality, as Benjamin Whorf put it, and this segmentation of nature, an aspect of grammar, sets the stage for agriculture. Julian Jaynes, in fact, concluded that the new linguistic mentality led very directly to agriculture. Unquestionably, the crystallization of language into writing, called forth mainly by the need for record-keeping of agricultural transactions, is the signal that civilization has begun. In the non-commodified, egalitarian hunter-gatherer ethos, the basis of which (as has so often been remarked) was sharing, number was not wanted. There was no ground for the urge to quantify, no reason to divide what was whole. Not until the domestication of animals and plants did this cultural concept fully emerge. Two of number’s seminal figures testify clearly to its alliance with separateness and property: Pythagoras, center of a highly influential religious cult of number, and Euclid, father of mathematics and science, whose geometry originated to measure fields for reasons of ownership, taxation and slave labor. One of civilization’s early forms, chieftainship, entails a linear rank order in which each member is assigned an exact numerical place. Soon, following the anti-natural linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-degree gridiron plan of even earliest cities appeared. Their insistent regularity constitutes in itself a repressive ideology. Culture, now numberized, becomes more firmly bounded and lifeless. Art, too, in its relationship to agriculture, highlights both institutions. It begins as a means to interpret and subdue reality, to rationalize nature, and conforms to the great turning point which is agriculture in its basic features. The pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; Franz Borkenau typified its pottery as a “narrow, timid botching of materials and forms.” With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life. And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming common. Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as autonomy preceded domestication and self-domestication, the rational and the social precede the symbolic. Food production, it is eternally and gratefully acknowledged, “permitted the cultural potentiality of the human species to develop.” But what is this tendency toward the symbolic, toward the elaboration and imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity for objectification, by which what is living becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce, “to do away with,” in Leakey and Lewin’s remarkable phrase, “the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.” Thus culture is governed by the imperative of reforming and subordinating nature. The artificial environment which is agriculture accomplished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism of objects manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance. For it is not only external nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face quality of pre-agricultural life in itself severely limited domination, while culture extends and legitimizes it.
It is likely that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms or names were attached to objects or ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and security found in agriculture means that the symbols became as static and constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and technological differentiation, under the sign of division of labor, interact to ground and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the symbolic shift and the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free life. It is the victory of cultural control; as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts it, “The amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.”
Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least “economically interesting” areas of the world where agriculture has not penetrated, such as the snows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines. And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bears its own rewards. The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, !Kung of Botswana, or the Kalahari Desert !Kung San-who were seen by Richard Lee as easily surviving a serious, several years’ drought while neighboring farmers starved-also testify to Hole and Flannery’s summary that “No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.” Service rightly attributed this condition to “the very simplicity of the technology and lack of control over the environment” of such groups. And yet simple Paleolithic methods were, in their own way, “advanced.” Consider a basic cooking technique like steaming foods by heating stones in a covered pit; this is immemorially older than any pottery, kettles or baskets (in fact, is anti-container in its non-surplus, non-exchange orientation) and is the most nutritionally sound way to cook, far healthier than boiling food in water, for example. Or consider the fashioning of such stone tools as the long and exceptionally thin “laurel leaf” knives, delicately chipped but strong, which modern industrial techniques cannot duplicate. The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most successful and enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In occasional pre-agriculture phenomena like the intensive collection of food or the systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of impending breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so long precisely because it was pleasurable. The “penury and day-long grind” of agriculture, in Clark’s words, is the vehicle of culture, “rational” only in its perpetual disequilibrium and its logical progression toward ever-greater destruction, as will be outlined below.
Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reversed (and has been by not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature of hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship of the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules absolutely. Evidence of the urge to impose order or subjugate is found in the coercive rites and uncleanness taboos of incipient religion. The eventual subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of its basis where ambiguous behavior is ruled out, purity and defilement defined and enforced. Lévi-Strauss defined religion as the anthropomorphism of nature; earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it. The sacred means that which is separated, and ritual and formalization, increasingly removed from the ongoing activities of daily life and in the control of such specialists as shamans and priests, are closely linked with hierarchy and institutionalized power. Religion emerges to ground and legitimize culture, by means of a “higher” order of reality; it is especially required, in this function of maintaining the solidarity of society, by the unnatural demands of agriculture. In the Neolithic village of Catal Hüyük in Turkish Anatolia, one of every three rooms was used for ritual purposes. Plowing and sowing can be seen as ritual renunciations, according to Burkert, a form of systematic repression accompanied by a sacrificial element. Speaking of sacrifice, which is the killing of domesticated animals (or even humans) for ritual purposes, it is pervasive in agricultural societies and found only there. Some of the major Neolithic religions often attempted a symbolic healing of the agricultural rupture with nature through the mythology of the earth mother, which needless to say does nothing to restore the lost unity. Fertility myths are also central; the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Persephone, Baal of the Canaanites, and the New Testament Jesus, gods whose death and resurrection testify to the perseverance of the soil, not to mention the human soul. The first temples signified the rise of cosmologies based on a model of the universe as an arena of domestication or barnyard, which in turn serves to justify the suppression of human autonomy. Whereas precivilized society was, as Redfield put it, “held together by largely undeclared but continually realized ethical conceptions,” religion developed as a way of creating citizens, placing the moral order under public management.
Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly increased divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social stratification. This amounted to an epochal mutation both in the character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter with ever more violence and work. Contrary to the myth of hunter-gatherers as violent and aggressive, by the way, recent evidence shows that existing non-farmers, such as the Mbuti (“pygmies”) studied by Turnbull, apparently do what killing they do without any aggressive spirit, even with a sort of regret. Warfare and the formation of every civilization or state, on the other hand, are inseparably linked.
Primal peoples did not fight over areas in which separate groups might converge in their gathering and hunting. At least “territorial” struggles are not part of the ethnographic literature and they would seem even less likely to have occurred in pre-history when resources were greater and contact with civilization non-existent. Indeed, these peoples had no conception of private property, and Rousseau’s figurative judgment, that divided society was founded by the man who first sowed a piece of ground, saying “This land is mine,” and found others to believe him, is essentially valid. “Mine and thine, the seeds of all mischief, have no place with them,” reads Pietro’s 1511 account of the natives encountered on Columbus’ second voyage. Centuries later, surviving Native Americans asked, “Sell the Earth? Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?” Agriculture creates and elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the loss. Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until agriculture. The human capacity of being shackled to crops and herds devolved rather quickly. Food production overcame the common absence or paucity of ritual and hierarchy in society and introduced civilized activities like the forced labor of temple-building. Here is the real “Cartesian split” between inner and outer reality, the separation whereby nature became merely something to be “worked.” On this capacity for a sedentary and servile existence rests the entire superstructure of civilization with its increasing weight of repression. Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children. Before farming, the egalitarianism of foraging life “applied as fully to women as to men,” judged Eleanor Leacock, owing to the autonomy of tasks and the fact that decisions were made by those who carried them out. In the absence of production and with no drudge work suitable for child labor such as weeding, women were not consigned to onerous chores or the constant supply of babies. Along with the curse of perpetual work, via agriculture, in the expulsion from Eden, God told woman, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and that desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Similarly, the first known codified laws, those of the Sumerian king Ur-Namu, prescribed death to any woman satisfying desires outside of marriage. Thus Whyte referred to the ground women “lost relative to men when humans first abandoned a simple hunting and gathering way of life,” and Simone de Beauvoir saw in the cultural equation of plow and phallus a fitting symbol of the oppression of women.
As wild animals are converted into sluggish meat-making machines, the concept of becoming “cultivated” is a virtue enforced on people, meaning the weeding out of freedom from one’s nature, in the service of domestication and exploitation. As Rice points out, in Sumer, the first civilization, the earliest cities had factories with their characteristic high organization and refraction of skills. Civilization from this point exacts human labor and the mass production of food, buildings, war and authority. To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it-ponos-has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow. The famous Old Testament curse on agriculture as the expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3:17–18) reminds us of the origin of work. As Mumford put it, “Conformity, repetition, patience were the keys to this [Neolithic] culture...the patient capacity for work.” In this monotony and passivity of tending and waiting is born, according to Paul Shepard, the peasant’s “deep, latent resentments, crude mixtures of rectitude and heaviness, and absence of humor.” One might also add a stoic insensitivity and lack of imagination inseparable from religious faith, sullenness, and suspicion among traits widely attributed to the domesticated life of farming.
Although food production by its nature includes a latent readiness for political domination and although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, the changeover involved a monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan! Against His-Story! is unrivaled on this, vastly enriching Toynbee’s attention to the “internal” and “external proletariats,” discontents within and without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from digging stick farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems, an almost total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
The formation and storage of surpluses are part of the domesticating will to control and make static, an aspect of the tendency to symbolize. A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus takes the forms of herd animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of wealth in the shape of storable grains do the gradations of labor and social classes proceed. While there were certainly wild grains before all this (and wild wheat, by the way, is 24 percent protein compared to 12 percent for domesticated wheat), the bias of culture makes every difference. Civilization and its cities rested as much on granaries as on symbolization. The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more impenetrable in light of the recent reversal of long-standing notions that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an absence of leisure. “One could no longer assume,” wrote Arme, “that early man domesticated plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If anything, the contrary appeared true, and the advent of farming saw the end of innocence.” For a long time, the question was “Why wasn’t agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?” More recently, we know that agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base.” Thus the consensus question now is, “Why was it adopted at all?”
Many theories have been advanced, none convincingly. Childe and others argue that population increase pushed human societies into more intimate contact with other species, leading to domestication and the need to produce in order to feed the additional people. But it has been shown rather conclusively that population increase did not precede agriculture but was caused by it. “I don’t see any evidence anywhere in the world,” concluded Flannery, “that suggests that population pressure was responsible for the beginning of agriculture.” Another theory has it that major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,000 years ago, that upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world and led directly to the cultivation of certain surviving staples. Recent dating methods have helped demolish this approach; no such climatic shift happened that could have forced the new mode into existence. Besides, there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted-or refused-in every type of climate. Another major hypothesis is that agriculture was introduced via a chance discovery or invention as if it had never occurred to the species before a certain moment that, for example, food grows from sprouted seeds. It seems certain that Paleolithic humanity had a virtually inexhaustible knowledge of flora and fauna for many tens of thousands of years before the cultivation of plants began, which renders this theory especially weak. Agreement with Carl Sauer’s summation that, “Agriculture did not originate from a growing or chronic shortage of food” is sufficient, in fact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that have been advanced. A remaining idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food production began at base as a religious activity. This hypothesis comes closest to plausibility.
Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to have been widely used in religious ceremonies, and to have been raised in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes. Before they were domesticated, moreover, sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes. The main use of the hen in southeastern Asia and the eastern Mediterranean-the earliest centers of civilization-“seems to have been,” according to Darby, “sacrificial or divinatory rather than alimentary.” Sauer adds that the “egg laying and meat producing qualities” of tamed fowl “are relatively late consequences of their domestication.” Wild cattle were fierce and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the modified meat texture of such castrates could have been foreseen. Cattle were not milked until centuries after their initial captivity, and representations indicate that their first known harnessing was to wagons in religious processions. Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar backgrounds so far as is known. Consider the New World examples of squash and pumpkin, used originally as ceremonial rattles. Johannessen discussed the religious and mystical motives connected with the domestication of maize, Mexico’s most important crop and center of its native Neolithic religion. Likewise, Anderson investigated the selection and development of distinctive types of various cultivated plants because of their magical significance. The shamans, I should add, were well-placed in positions of power to introduce agriculture via the taming and planting involved in ritual and religion, sketchily referred to above. Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has been somewhat overlooked, it brings us, in my opinion, to the very doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of production: that non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of time, language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and psychic life in agriculture. “Religion” is too narrow a conceptualization of this infection and its growth. Domination is too weighty, too all-encompassing to have been solely conveyed by the pathology that is religion.
But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of religion are certainly part of agriculture, and from the beginning. Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily, Anderson studied the very primitive agriculturalists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their variety of corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant. True to culture, showing that it is complete from the beginning of production, the Naga kept their varieties so pure “only by a fanatical adherence to an ideal type.” This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production in domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.
The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the domesticating of animals, which also defies natural selection and re-establishes the controllable organic world at a debased, artificial level. Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a dairy cow, for instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass to milk. Transmuted from a state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, these animals become completely dependent on man for survival. In domestic mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to activity. Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable intelligence of wild sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social relationships among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials. Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed, and the animal’s very capacity to recognize its own species is impaired. Farming also created the potential for rapid environmental destruction and the domination over nature soon began to turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization into barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have changed their aspect completely,” estimates Zeuner, “always to quasi-drier condition, since the beginnings of the Neolithic.” Deserts now occupy most of the areas where the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much historical evidence that these early formations inevitably ruined their environments.
Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East and Asia, agriculture turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry, and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato described Attica as “a skeleton wasted by disease,” referring to the deforestation of Greece and contrasting it to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the first domesticated ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece, Lebanon, and North Africa, and the desertification of the Roman and Mesopotamian empires. Another, more immediate impact of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researches show that “the diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor expended.”
The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition caused by the changeover from food gathering to food production.” Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised. Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of Florida Indian fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30s and 40s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age only fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks were passed. DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. “Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental caries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain. People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H. Post, have heard a single-engine plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the quality-and probably in the length-of human life among farmers as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated.
One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.
The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas “All civilizations,” Wenke reminds us,” have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The world’s population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed worldwide, so that an Inuit Eskimo and an African may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the world’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingered in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounced that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer re-cross a certain threshold of civilization and once again become part of a natural habitat. He further stated, expressing perfectly the original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, “As the earth in its primitive state is not adapted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at base all mass production is farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid-American prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plows in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the world’s seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to consumption. Although Lévi-Strauss is right that “Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugar beets,” only since World War II has a completely synthetic orientation begun to dominate.
Agriculture takes more organic matter out of the soil than it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially bad. J.Russell Smith called it “the killer of continents...and one of the worst enemies of the human future.” The erosion cost of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large-scale industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage of huge monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no application of manure or humus, obviously raises soil deterioration and soil loss to much higher levels. The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for the complex life of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production. The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere.
But more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination of the soil, ground water and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two billion tons of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological imbalance caused by monocropping and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of course, with spiraling applications of more synthetic fertilizers, and “weed” and “pest” killers, accelerating the crime against nature.
Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and technology. But rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution drove millions of poor people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communalism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on an unprecedented scale. Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily increasing. Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two Belgiums is being converted to desert worldwide. The fate of the world’s tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this desiccation: half of them have been erased in the past thirty years. In Botswana, the last wilderness region of Africa has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the hamburger markets in the U.S. and Europe. The few areas safe from deforestation are where agriculture doesn’t want to go. The destruction of the land is proceeding in the U.S. over a greater land area than was encompassed by the original thirteen colonies, just as it was at the heart of the severe African famine of the mid-1980s, and the extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another.
Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in which God said to Noah, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.” When newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard of production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The agriculturalized mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal world, plus the need to maintain dominance over it.
The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as, increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial environments. Billions of chickens, pigs, and veal calves, for example, no longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields, fields growing more silent as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed for these hideously confined beings.
The high-tech chickens, whose beak ends have been clipped off to reduce death from stress-induced fighting, often exist four or even five to a 12” by 18” cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for up to ten days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are endemic because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their piglets separated by metal grates, mother and offspring barred from natural contact. Veal calves are often raised in darkness, chained to stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal posture adjustment. These animals are generally under regimens of constant medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened susceptibility to diseases; automated animal production relies upon hormones and antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model. Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a technological production system in which finally even our senses have become redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food’s value or safety, is no longer experienced, but rather certified by a label. Overall, the healthfulness of what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs, creating the context for famine. Even the non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling, transport and storage, not nutrition or pleasure, are the highest considerations. Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the biosphere proceeds even more lethally in its daily, global forms. Food as a function of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious level: half of the world, as everyone knows, suffers from malnourishment ranging to starvation itself.
Meanwhile, the “diseases of civilization,” as discussed by Eaton and Konner in the January 31, 1985 New England Journal of Medicine and contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless, sickly world of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestication reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering, with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorganisms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.
The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The “success” of civilization’s progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes more and more like ashes. James Serpell summed it up this way: “In short we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand; we seem unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the planet is fast becoming a wasteland.” Physiologist Jared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution.
Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine. “To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to efface its irregularities and banish its surprises,” these words of E.M. Cioran apply perfectly to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as mainly sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of separated life. Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself. Historical time, like agriculture, is not inherent in social reality but an imposition on it. The dimension of time or history is a function of repression, whose foundation is production or agriculture. Hunter-gatherer life was anti-time in its simultaneous and spontaneous openness; farming life generates a sense of time by its successive-task narrowness, its directed routine. As the non-closure and variety of Paleolithic living gave way to the literal enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and came to take on the character of an enclosed space. Formalized temporal reference points — ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of days, etc. — are crucial to the ordering of the world of production; as a schedule of production, the calendar is integral to civilization. Conversely, not only would industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the end of agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of historical time.
Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire. By displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and brought under strict control; all direct, unmediated experience is subsumed by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language. Language cuts up and organizes reality, as Benjamin Whorf put it, and this segmentation of nature, an aspect of grammar, sets the stage for agriculture. Julian Jaynes, in fact, concluded that the new linguistic mentality led very directly to agriculture. Unquestionably, the crystallization of language into writing, called forth mainly by the need for record-keeping of agricultural transactions, is the signal that civilization has begun. In the non-commodified, egalitarian hunter-gatherer ethos, the basis of which (as has so often been remarked) was sharing, number was not wanted. There was no ground for the urge to quantify, no reason to divide what was whole. Not until the domestication of animals and plants did this cultural concept fully emerge. Two of number’s seminal figures testify clearly to its alliance with separateness and property: Pythagoras, center of a highly influential religious cult of number, and Euclid, father of mathematics and science, whose geometry originated to measure fields for reasons of ownership, taxation and slave labor. One of civilization’s early forms, chieftainship, entails a linear rank order in which each member is assigned an exact numerical place. Soon, following the anti-natural linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-degree gridiron plan of even earliest cities appeared. Their insistent regularity constitutes in itself a repressive ideology. Culture, now numberized, becomes more firmly bounded and lifeless. Art, too, in its relationship to agriculture, highlights both institutions. It begins as a means to interpret and subdue reality, to rationalize nature, and conforms to the great turning point which is agriculture in its basic features. The pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; Franz Borkenau typified its pottery as a “narrow, timid botching of materials and forms.” With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life. And where there had been no representation in Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming common. Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as autonomy preceded domestication and self-domestication, the rational and the social precede the symbolic. Food production, it is eternally and gratefully acknowledged, “permitted the cultural potentiality of the human species to develop.” But what is this tendency toward the symbolic, toward the elaboration and imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity for objectification, by which what is living becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce, “to do away with,” in Leakey and Lewin’s remarkable phrase, “the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.” Thus culture is governed by the imperative of reforming and subordinating nature. The artificial environment which is agriculture accomplished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism of objects manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance. For it is not only external nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face quality of pre-agricultural life in itself severely limited domination, while culture extends and legitimizes it.
It is likely that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms or names were attached to objects or ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and security found in agriculture means that the symbols became as static and constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and technological differentiation, under the sign of division of labor, interact to ground and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the symbolic shift and the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free life. It is the victory of cultural control; as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts it, “The amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.”
Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least “economically interesting” areas of the world where agriculture has not penetrated, such as the snows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines. And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bears its own rewards. The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, !Kung of Botswana, or the Kalahari Desert !Kung San-who were seen by Richard Lee as easily surviving a serious, several years’ drought while neighboring farmers starved-also testify to Hole and Flannery’s summary that “No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.” Service rightly attributed this condition to “the very simplicity of the technology and lack of control over the environment” of such groups. And yet simple Paleolithic methods were, in their own way, “advanced.” Consider a basic cooking technique like steaming foods by heating stones in a covered pit; this is immemorially older than any pottery, kettles or baskets (in fact, is anti-container in its non-surplus, non-exchange orientation) and is the most nutritionally sound way to cook, far healthier than boiling food in water, for example. Or consider the fashioning of such stone tools as the long and exceptionally thin “laurel leaf” knives, delicately chipped but strong, which modern industrial techniques cannot duplicate. The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most successful and enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In occasional pre-agriculture phenomena like the intensive collection of food or the systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of impending breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so long precisely because it was pleasurable. The “penury and day-long grind” of agriculture, in Clark’s words, is the vehicle of culture, “rational” only in its perpetual disequilibrium and its logical progression toward ever-greater destruction, as will be outlined below.
Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reversed (and has been by not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature of hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship of the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules absolutely. Evidence of the urge to impose order or subjugate is found in the coercive rites and uncleanness taboos of incipient religion. The eventual subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of its basis where ambiguous behavior is ruled out, purity and defilement defined and enforced. Lévi-Strauss defined religion as the anthropomorphism of nature; earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it. The sacred means that which is separated, and ritual and formalization, increasingly removed from the ongoing activities of daily life and in the control of such specialists as shamans and priests, are closely linked with hierarchy and institutionalized power. Religion emerges to ground and legitimize culture, by means of a “higher” order of reality; it is especially required, in this function of maintaining the solidarity of society, by the unnatural demands of agriculture. In the Neolithic village of Catal Hüyük in Turkish Anatolia, one of every three rooms was used for ritual purposes. Plowing and sowing can be seen as ritual renunciations, according to Burkert, a form of systematic repression accompanied by a sacrificial element. Speaking of sacrifice, which is the killing of domesticated animals (or even humans) for ritual purposes, it is pervasive in agricultural societies and found only there. Some of the major Neolithic religions often attempted a symbolic healing of the agricultural rupture with nature through the mythology of the earth mother, which needless to say does nothing to restore the lost unity. Fertility myths are also central; the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Persephone, Baal of the Canaanites, and the New Testament Jesus, gods whose death and resurrection testify to the perseverance of the soil, not to mention the human soul. The first temples signified the rise of cosmologies based on a model of the universe as an arena of domestication or barnyard, which in turn serves to justify the suppression of human autonomy. Whereas precivilized society was, as Redfield put it, “held together by largely undeclared but continually realized ethical conceptions,” religion developed as a way of creating citizens, placing the moral order under public management.
Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly increased divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social stratification. This amounted to an epochal mutation both in the character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter with ever more violence and work. Contrary to the myth of hunter-gatherers as violent and aggressive, by the way, recent evidence shows that existing non-farmers, such as the Mbuti (“pygmies”) studied by Turnbull, apparently do what killing they do without any aggressive spirit, even with a sort of regret. Warfare and the formation of every civilization or state, on the other hand, are inseparably linked.
Primal peoples did not fight over areas in which separate groups might converge in their gathering and hunting. At least “territorial” struggles are not part of the ethnographic literature and they would seem even less likely to have occurred in pre-history when resources were greater and contact with civilization non-existent. Indeed, these peoples had no conception of private property, and Rousseau’s figurative judgment, that divided society was founded by the man who first sowed a piece of ground, saying “This land is mine,” and found others to believe him, is essentially valid. “Mine and thine, the seeds of all mischief, have no place with them,” reads Pietro’s 1511 account of the natives encountered on Columbus’ second voyage. Centuries later, surviving Native Americans asked, “Sell the Earth? Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?” Agriculture creates and elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the loss. Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until agriculture. The human capacity of being shackled to crops and herds devolved rather quickly. Food production overcame the common absence or paucity of ritual and hierarchy in society and introduced civilized activities like the forced labor of temple-building. Here is the real “Cartesian split” between inner and outer reality, the separation whereby nature became merely something to be “worked.” On this capacity for a sedentary and servile existence rests the entire superstructure of civilization with its increasing weight of repression. Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children. Before farming, the egalitarianism of foraging life “applied as fully to women as to men,” judged Eleanor Leacock, owing to the autonomy of tasks and the fact that decisions were made by those who carried them out. In the absence of production and with no drudge work suitable for child labor such as weeding, women were not consigned to onerous chores or the constant supply of babies. Along with the curse of perpetual work, via agriculture, in the expulsion from Eden, God told woman, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and that desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Similarly, the first known codified laws, those of the Sumerian king Ur-Namu, prescribed death to any woman satisfying desires outside of marriage. Thus Whyte referred to the ground women “lost relative to men when humans first abandoned a simple hunting and gathering way of life,” and Simone de Beauvoir saw in the cultural equation of plow and phallus a fitting symbol of the oppression of women.
As wild animals are converted into sluggish meat-making machines, the concept of becoming “cultivated” is a virtue enforced on people, meaning the weeding out of freedom from one’s nature, in the service of domestication and exploitation. As Rice points out, in Sumer, the first civilization, the earliest cities had factories with their characteristic high organization and refraction of skills. Civilization from this point exacts human labor and the mass production of food, buildings, war and authority. To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it-ponos-has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow. The famous Old Testament curse on agriculture as the expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3:17–18) reminds us of the origin of work. As Mumford put it, “Conformity, repetition, patience were the keys to this [Neolithic] culture...the patient capacity for work.” In this monotony and passivity of tending and waiting is born, according to Paul Shepard, the peasant’s “deep, latent resentments, crude mixtures of rectitude and heaviness, and absence of humor.” One might also add a stoic insensitivity and lack of imagination inseparable from religious faith, sullenness, and suspicion among traits widely attributed to the domesticated life of farming.
Although food production by its nature includes a latent readiness for political domination and although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, the changeover involved a monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan! Against His-Story! is unrivaled on this, vastly enriching Toynbee’s attention to the “internal” and “external proletariats,” discontents within and without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from digging stick farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems, an almost total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
The formation and storage of surpluses are part of the domesticating will to control and make static, an aspect of the tendency to symbolize. A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus takes the forms of herd animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of wealth in the shape of storable grains do the gradations of labor and social classes proceed. While there were certainly wild grains before all this (and wild wheat, by the way, is 24 percent protein compared to 12 percent for domesticated wheat), the bias of culture makes every difference. Civilization and its cities rested as much on granaries as on symbolization. The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more impenetrable in light of the recent reversal of long-standing notions that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an absence of leisure. “One could no longer assume,” wrote Arme, “that early man domesticated plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If anything, the contrary appeared true, and the advent of farming saw the end of innocence.” For a long time, the question was “Why wasn’t agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?” More recently, we know that agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base.” Thus the consensus question now is, “Why was it adopted at all?”
Many theories have been advanced, none convincingly. Childe and others argue that population increase pushed human societies into more intimate contact with other species, leading to domestication and the need to produce in order to feed the additional people. But it has been shown rather conclusively that population increase did not precede agriculture but was caused by it. “I don’t see any evidence anywhere in the world,” concluded Flannery, “that suggests that population pressure was responsible for the beginning of agriculture.” Another theory has it that major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,000 years ago, that upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world and led directly to the cultivation of certain surviving staples. Recent dating methods have helped demolish this approach; no such climatic shift happened that could have forced the new mode into existence. Besides, there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted-or refused-in every type of climate. Another major hypothesis is that agriculture was introduced via a chance discovery or invention as if it had never occurred to the species before a certain moment that, for example, food grows from sprouted seeds. It seems certain that Paleolithic humanity had a virtually inexhaustible knowledge of flora and fauna for many tens of thousands of years before the cultivation of plants began, which renders this theory especially weak. Agreement with Carl Sauer’s summation that, “Agriculture did not originate from a growing or chronic shortage of food” is sufficient, in fact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that have been advanced. A remaining idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food production began at base as a religious activity. This hypothesis comes closest to plausibility.
Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to have been widely used in religious ceremonies, and to have been raised in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes. Before they were domesticated, moreover, sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes. The main use of the hen in southeastern Asia and the eastern Mediterranean-the earliest centers of civilization-“seems to have been,” according to Darby, “sacrificial or divinatory rather than alimentary.” Sauer adds that the “egg laying and meat producing qualities” of tamed fowl “are relatively late consequences of their domestication.” Wild cattle were fierce and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the modified meat texture of such castrates could have been foreseen. Cattle were not milked until centuries after their initial captivity, and representations indicate that their first known harnessing was to wagons in religious processions. Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar backgrounds so far as is known. Consider the New World examples of squash and pumpkin, used originally as ceremonial rattles. Johannessen discussed the religious and mystical motives connected with the domestication of maize, Mexico’s most important crop and center of its native Neolithic religion. Likewise, Anderson investigated the selection and development of distinctive types of various cultivated plants because of their magical significance. The shamans, I should add, were well-placed in positions of power to introduce agriculture via the taming and planting involved in ritual and religion, sketchily referred to above. Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has been somewhat overlooked, it brings us, in my opinion, to the very doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of production: that non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of time, language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and psychic life in agriculture. “Religion” is too narrow a conceptualization of this infection and its growth. Domination is too weighty, too all-encompassing to have been solely conveyed by the pathology that is religion.
But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of religion are certainly part of agriculture, and from the beginning. Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily, Anderson studied the very primitive agriculturalists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their variety of corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant. True to culture, showing that it is complete from the beginning of production, the Naga kept their varieties so pure “only by a fanatical adherence to an ideal type.” This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production in domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.
The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the domesticating of animals, which also defies natural selection and re-establishes the controllable organic world at a debased, artificial level. Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a dairy cow, for instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass to milk. Transmuted from a state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, these animals become completely dependent on man for survival. In domestic mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to activity. Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most domesticated of herd animals; the remarkable intelligence of wild sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social relationships among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials. Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed, and the animal’s very capacity to recognize its own species is impaired. Farming also created the potential for rapid environmental destruction and the domination over nature soon began to turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization into barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have changed their aspect completely,” estimates Zeuner, “always to quasi-drier condition, since the beginnings of the Neolithic.” Deserts now occupy most of the areas where the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much historical evidence that these early formations inevitably ruined their environments.
Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East and Asia, agriculture turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry, and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato described Attica as “a skeleton wasted by disease,” referring to the deforestation of Greece and contrasting it to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the first domesticated ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece, Lebanon, and North Africa, and the desertification of the Roman and Mesopotamian empires. Another, more immediate impact of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researches show that “the diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor expended.”
The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition caused by the changeover from food gathering to food production.” Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised. Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of Florida Indian fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30s and 40s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age only fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks were passed. DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. “Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental caries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain. People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H. Post, have heard a single-engine plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the quality-and probably in the length-of human life among farmers as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated.
One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.
The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas “All civilizations,” Wenke reminds us,” have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The world’s population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed worldwide, so that an Inuit Eskimo and an African may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the world’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingered in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounced that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer re-cross a certain threshold of civilization and once again become part of a natural habitat. He further stated, expressing perfectly the original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, “As the earth in its primitive state is not adapted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at base all mass production is farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid-American prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plows in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the world’s seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to consumption. Although Lévi-Strauss is right that “Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugar beets,” only since World War II has a completely synthetic orientation begun to dominate.
Agriculture takes more organic matter out of the soil than it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially bad. J.Russell Smith called it “the killer of continents...and one of the worst enemies of the human future.” The erosion cost of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large-scale industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage of huge monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no application of manure or humus, obviously raises soil deterioration and soil loss to much higher levels. The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for the complex life of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production. The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere.
But more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination of the soil, ground water and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two billion tons of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological imbalance caused by monocropping and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of course, with spiraling applications of more synthetic fertilizers, and “weed” and “pest” killers, accelerating the crime against nature.
Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and technology. But rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution drove millions of poor people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communalism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on an unprecedented scale. Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily increasing. Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two Belgiums is being converted to desert worldwide. The fate of the world’s tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this desiccation: half of them have been erased in the past thirty years. In Botswana, the last wilderness region of Africa has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the hamburger markets in the U.S. and Europe. The few areas safe from deforestation are where agriculture doesn’t want to go. The destruction of the land is proceeding in the U.S. over a greater land area than was encompassed by the original thirteen colonies, just as it was at the heart of the severe African famine of the mid-1980s, and the extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another.
Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in which God said to Noah, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.” When newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard of production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The agriculturalized mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal world, plus the need to maintain dominance over it.
The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as, increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial environments. Billions of chickens, pigs, and veal calves, for example, no longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields, fields growing more silent as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed for these hideously confined beings.
The high-tech chickens, whose beak ends have been clipped off to reduce death from stress-induced fighting, often exist four or even five to a 12” by 18” cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for up to ten days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are endemic because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their piglets separated by metal grates, mother and offspring barred from natural contact. Veal calves are often raised in darkness, chained to stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal posture adjustment. These animals are generally under regimens of constant medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened susceptibility to diseases; automated animal production relies upon hormones and antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model. Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a technological production system in which finally even our senses have become redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food’s value or safety, is no longer experienced, but rather certified by a label. Overall, the healthfulness of what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs, creating the context for famine. Even the non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling, transport and storage, not nutrition or pleasure, are the highest considerations. Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the biosphere proceeds even more lethally in its daily, global forms. Food as a function of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious level: half of the world, as everyone knows, suffers from malnourishment ranging to starvation itself.
Meanwhile, the “diseases of civilization,” as discussed by Eaton and Konner in the January 31, 1985 New England Journal of Medicine and contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless, sickly world of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestication reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering, with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorganisms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.
The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The “success” of civilization’s progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes more and more like ashes. James Serpell summed it up this way: “In short we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand; we seem unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the planet is fast becoming a wasteland.” Physiologist Jared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution.
"The Modern Anti-World" John Zerzan
There now exists only one civilization, a single global domestication machine. Modernity’s continuing efforts to disenchant and instrumentalize the non-cultural, natural world have produced a reality in which there is virtually nothing left outside the system. This trajectory was already visible by the time of the first urbanites. Since those Neolithic times we have moved ever closer to the complete de-realization of nature, culminating in a state of world emergency today. Approaching ruin is the commonplace vista, our obvious non-future.
It’s hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are valid. Modernity is inherently globalizing, massifying, standardizing. The self-evident conclusion that an indefinite expansion of productive forces will be fatal deals the final blow to belief in progress. As China’s industrialization efforts go into hyper-drive, we have another graphic case in point.
Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on technology, civilization’s material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation. One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment of self, society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.
A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.
Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by what Pico Ayer calls “airport culture” — rootless, urban, homogenized.
Modernity finds its original basis in colonialism, just as civilization itself is founded on domination — at an ever more basic level. Some would like to forget this pivotal element of conquest, or else “transcend” it, as in Enrique Dussel’s facile “new trans-modernity” pseudo-resolution (The Invention of the Americas, 1995). Scott Lash employs somewhat similar sleight-of-hand in Another Modernity: A Different Rationality (1999), a feeble nonsense title given his affirmation of the world of technoculture. One more tortuous failure is Alternative Modernity (1995), in which Andrew Feenberg sagely observes that “technology is not a particular value one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end.” The triumphant world of technicized civilization — known to us as modernization, globalization, or capitalism — has nothing to fear from such empty evasiveness.
Paradoxically, most contemporary works of social analysis provide grounds for an indictment of the modern world, yet fail to confront the consequences of the context they develop. David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous (1995), for example, provides a very critical overview of the roots of the anti-life totality, only to conclude on an absurd note. Ducking the logical conclusion of his entire book (which should be a call to oppose the horrific contours of techno-civilization), Abrams decides that this movement toward the abyss is, after all, earth-based and “organic.” Thus “sooner or later [it] must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land.” An astoundingly irresponsible way to conclude his analysis.
Richard Stivers has studied the dominant contemporary ethos of loneliness, boredom, mental illness, etc., especially in his Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of Technological Society (1998). But this work fizzles out into quietism, just as his critique in Technology as Magic ends with a similar avoidance: “the struggle is not against technology, which is a simplistic understanding of the problem, but against a technological system that is now our life-milieu.”
The Enigma of Health (1996) by Hans Georg Gadamer advises us to bring “the achievements of modern society, with all of its automated, bureaucratic and technological apparatus, back into the service of that fundamental rhythm which sustains the proper order of bodily life”. Nine pages earlier, Gadamer observes that it is precisely this apparatus of objectification that produces our “violent estrangement from ourselves.”
The list of examples could fill a small library — and the horror show goes on. One datum among thousands is this society’s staggering level of dependence on drug technology. Work, sleep, recreation, non-anxiety/depression, sexual function, sports performance — what is exempt? Anti-depressant use among preschoolers — preschoolers — is surging, for example (New York Times, April 2, 2004).
Aside from the double-talk of countless semi-critical “theorists”, however, is the simple weight of unapologetic inertia: the countless voices who counsel that modernity is simply inescapable and we should desist from questioning it. It’s clear that there is no escaping modernization anywhere in the world, they say, and that is unalterable. Such fatalism is well captured by the title of Michel Dertourzos’ What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (1997).
Small wonder that nostalgia is so prevalent, that passionate yearning for all that has been stripped from our lives. Ubiquitous loss mounts, along with protest against our uprootedness, and calls for a return home. As ever, partisans of deepening domestication tell us to abandon our desires and grow up. Norman Jacobson (“Escape from Alienation: Challenges to the Nation-State,” Representations 84: 2004) warns that nostalgia becomes dangerous, a hazard to the State, if it leaves the world of art or legend. This craven leftist counsels “realism” not fantasies: “Learning to live with alienation is the equivalent in the political sphere of the relinquishment of the security blanket of our infancy.”
Civilization, as Freud knew, must be defended against the individual; all of its institutions are part of that defense.
But how do we get out of here — off this death ship? Nostalgia alone is hardly adequate to the project of emancipation. The biggest obstacle to taking the first step is as obvious as it is profound. If understanding comes first, it should be clear that one cannot accept the totality and also formulate an authentic critique and a qualitatively different vision of that totality. This fundamental inconsistency results in the glaring incoherence of some of the works cited above.
I return to Walter Benjamin’s striking allegory of the meaning of modernity:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (1940).
There was a time when this storm was not raging, when nature was not an adversary to be conquered and tamed into everything that is barren and ersatz. But we’ve been traveling at increasing speed, with rising gusts of progress at our backs, to even further disenchantment, whose impoverished totality now severely imperils both life and health.
Systematic complexity fragments, colonizes, debases daily life. Division of labor, its motor, diminishes humanness in its very depths, dis-abling and pacifying us. This de-skilling specialization, which gives us the illusion of competence, is a key, enabling predicate of domestication.
Before domestication, Ernest Gellner (Sword, Plow and Book, 1989) noted, “there simply was no possibility of a growth in scale and in complexity of the division of labour and social differentiation.” Of course, there is still an enforced consensus that a “regression” from civilization would entail too high a cost — bolstered by fictitious scary scenarios, most of them resembling nothing so much as the current products of modernity.
People have begun to interrogate modernity. Already a specter is haunting its now crumbling façade. In the 1980s, Jurgen Habermas feared that the “ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of premodernity,” had already attained some popularity. A great tide of such thinking seems all but inevitable, and is beginning to resonate in popular films, novels, music, zines, TV shows, etc.
And it is also a sad fact that accumulated damage has caused a widespread loss of optimism and hope. Refusal to break with the totality crowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Only visions completely undefined by the current reality constitute our first steps to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the enemy’s terms. (This position may appear extreme; 19th century abolitionism also appeared extreme when its adherents declared that only an end to slavery was acceptable, and that reforms were pro-slavery.)
Marx understood modern society as a state of “permanent revolution,” in perpetual, innovating movement. Postmodernity brings more of the same, as accelerating change renders everything human (such as our closest relationships) frail and undone. The reality of this motion and fluidity has been raised to a virtue by postmodern thinkers, who celebrate undecidability as a universal condition. All is in flux, and context-free; every image or viewpoint is as ephemeral and as valid as any other.
This outlook is the postmodern totality, the position from which postmodernists condemn all other viewpoints. Postmodernism’s historic ground is unknown to itself, because of a founding aversion to overviews and totalities. Unaware of Kaczynski’s central idea (Industrial Society and Its Future, 1996) that meaning and freedom are progressively banished by modern technological society, postmodernists would be equally uninterested in the fact that Max Weber wrote the same thing almost a century before. Or that the movement of society, so described, is the historical truth of what postmodernists analyze so abstractly, as if it were a novelty they alone (partially) understand.
Shrinking from any grasp of the logic of the system as a whole, via a host of forbidden areas of thought, the anti-totality stance of these embarrassing frauds is ridiculed by a reality that is more totalized and global than ever. The surrender of the postmodernists is an exact reflection of feelings of helplessness that pervade the culture. Ethical indifference and aesthetic self-absorption join hands with moral paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resistance. It is no surprise that a non-Westerner such as Ziauddin Sardan (Postmodernism and the Other, 1998) judges that postmodernism “preserves — indeed enhances — all the classical and modern structures of oppression and domination.”
This prevailing fashion of culture may not enjoy much more of a shelf life. It is, after all, only the latest retail offering in the marketplace of representation. By its very nature, symbolic culture generates distance and mediation, supposedly inescapable burdens of the human condition. The self has always only been a trick of language, says Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than the modes through which language autonomously passes, Derrida informs us.
The outcome of the imperialism of the symbolic is the sad commonplace that human embodiment plays no essential role in the functions of mind or reason. Conversely, it’s vital to rule out the possibility that things have ever been different. Postmodernism resolutely bans the subject of origins, the notion that we were not always defined and reified by symbolic culture. Computer simulation is the latest advance in representation, its disembodied power fantasies exactly paralleling modernity’s central essence.
The postmodernist stance refuses to admit stark reality, with discernible roots and essential dynamics. Benjamin’s “storm” of progress is pressing forward on all fronts. Endless aesthetic-textual evasions amount to rank cowardice. Thomas Lamarre serves up a typical postmodern apologetic on the subject: “Modernity appears as a process or rupture and reinscription; alternative modernities entail an opening of otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or reinscribing it. It is as if modernity itself is deconstruction.” (Impacts of Modernities, 2004).
Except that it isn’t, as if anyone needed to point that out. Alas, deconstruction and detotalization have nothing in common. Deconstruction plays its role in keeping the whole system going, which is a real catastrophe, the actual, ongoing one.
The era of virtual communication coincides with the postmodern abdication, an age of enfeebled symbolic culture. Weakened and cheapened connectivity finds its analogue in the fetishization of ever-shifting, debased textual “meaning.” Swallowed in an environment that is more and more one immense aggregate of symbols, deconstruction embraces this prison and declares it to be the only possible world. But the depreciation of the symbolic, including illiteracy and a cynicism about narrative in general, may lead in the direction of bringing the whole civilizational project into question. Civilization’s failure at this most fundamental level is becoming as clear as its deadly and multiplying personal, social, and environmental effects.
“Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists,” predicted Georges Bataille. Language and the symbolic are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, according to Derrida and the rest. Yet we see at the same time an ever-diminishing vista of understanding. The seeming paradox of an engulfing dimension of representation and a shrinking amount of meaning finally causes the former to become susceptible — first to doubt, then to subversion.
Husserl tried to establish an approach to meaning based on respecting experience/ phenomena just as it is delivered to us, before it is re-presented by the logic of symbolism. Small surprise that this effort has been a central target of postmodernists, who have understood the need to extirpate such a vision. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this opposition succinctly, decreeing that “We have no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that holds man [sic] in its bosom” (The Birth to Presence, 1993). How desperately do those who collaborate with the reigning nightmare resist the fact that during the two million years before civilization, this earth was precisely a place that did not abandon us and did hold us to its bosom.
Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking. Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The “time” of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight. Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence.
It is language that speaks, in Heidegger’s phrase. But was it always so? This world is over-full of images, simulations — a result of choices that may seem irreversible. A species has, in a few thousand years, destroyed community and created a ruin. A ruin called culture. The bonds of closeness to the earth and to each other — outside of domestication, cities, war, etc. — have been sundered, but can they not heal?
Under the sign of a unitary civilization, the possibly fatal onslaught against anything alive and distinctive has been fully unleashed for all to see. Globalization has in fact only intensified what was underway well before modernity. The tirelessly systematized colonization and uniformity, first set in motion by the decision to control and tame, now has enemies who see it for what it is and for the ending it will surely bring, unless it is defeated. The choice at the beginning of history was, as now, that of presence versus representation.
Gadamer describes medicine as, at base, the restoration of what belongs to nature. Healing as removing whatever works against life’s wonderful capacity to renew itself. The spirit of anarchy, I believe, is similar. Remove what blocks our way and it’s all there, waiting for us.
It’s hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are valid. Modernity is inherently globalizing, massifying, standardizing. The self-evident conclusion that an indefinite expansion of productive forces will be fatal deals the final blow to belief in progress. As China’s industrialization efforts go into hyper-drive, we have another graphic case in point.
Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on technology, civilization’s material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation. One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment of self, society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.
A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.
Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by what Pico Ayer calls “airport culture” — rootless, urban, homogenized.
Modernity finds its original basis in colonialism, just as civilization itself is founded on domination — at an ever more basic level. Some would like to forget this pivotal element of conquest, or else “transcend” it, as in Enrique Dussel’s facile “new trans-modernity” pseudo-resolution (The Invention of the Americas, 1995). Scott Lash employs somewhat similar sleight-of-hand in Another Modernity: A Different Rationality (1999), a feeble nonsense title given his affirmation of the world of technoculture. One more tortuous failure is Alternative Modernity (1995), in which Andrew Feenberg sagely observes that “technology is not a particular value one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end.” The triumphant world of technicized civilization — known to us as modernization, globalization, or capitalism — has nothing to fear from such empty evasiveness.
Paradoxically, most contemporary works of social analysis provide grounds for an indictment of the modern world, yet fail to confront the consequences of the context they develop. David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous (1995), for example, provides a very critical overview of the roots of the anti-life totality, only to conclude on an absurd note. Ducking the logical conclusion of his entire book (which should be a call to oppose the horrific contours of techno-civilization), Abrams decides that this movement toward the abyss is, after all, earth-based and “organic.” Thus “sooner or later [it] must accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land.” An astoundingly irresponsible way to conclude his analysis.
Richard Stivers has studied the dominant contemporary ethos of loneliness, boredom, mental illness, etc., especially in his Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of Technological Society (1998). But this work fizzles out into quietism, just as his critique in Technology as Magic ends with a similar avoidance: “the struggle is not against technology, which is a simplistic understanding of the problem, but against a technological system that is now our life-milieu.”
The Enigma of Health (1996) by Hans Georg Gadamer advises us to bring “the achievements of modern society, with all of its automated, bureaucratic and technological apparatus, back into the service of that fundamental rhythm which sustains the proper order of bodily life”. Nine pages earlier, Gadamer observes that it is precisely this apparatus of objectification that produces our “violent estrangement from ourselves.”
The list of examples could fill a small library — and the horror show goes on. One datum among thousands is this society’s staggering level of dependence on drug technology. Work, sleep, recreation, non-anxiety/depression, sexual function, sports performance — what is exempt? Anti-depressant use among preschoolers — preschoolers — is surging, for example (New York Times, April 2, 2004).
Aside from the double-talk of countless semi-critical “theorists”, however, is the simple weight of unapologetic inertia: the countless voices who counsel that modernity is simply inescapable and we should desist from questioning it. It’s clear that there is no escaping modernization anywhere in the world, they say, and that is unalterable. Such fatalism is well captured by the title of Michel Dertourzos’ What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (1997).
Small wonder that nostalgia is so prevalent, that passionate yearning for all that has been stripped from our lives. Ubiquitous loss mounts, along with protest against our uprootedness, and calls for a return home. As ever, partisans of deepening domestication tell us to abandon our desires and grow up. Norman Jacobson (“Escape from Alienation: Challenges to the Nation-State,” Representations 84: 2004) warns that nostalgia becomes dangerous, a hazard to the State, if it leaves the world of art or legend. This craven leftist counsels “realism” not fantasies: “Learning to live with alienation is the equivalent in the political sphere of the relinquishment of the security blanket of our infancy.”
Civilization, as Freud knew, must be defended against the individual; all of its institutions are part of that defense.
But how do we get out of here — off this death ship? Nostalgia alone is hardly adequate to the project of emancipation. The biggest obstacle to taking the first step is as obvious as it is profound. If understanding comes first, it should be clear that one cannot accept the totality and also formulate an authentic critique and a qualitatively different vision of that totality. This fundamental inconsistency results in the glaring incoherence of some of the works cited above.
I return to Walter Benjamin’s striking allegory of the meaning of modernity:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (1940).
There was a time when this storm was not raging, when nature was not an adversary to be conquered and tamed into everything that is barren and ersatz. But we’ve been traveling at increasing speed, with rising gusts of progress at our backs, to even further disenchantment, whose impoverished totality now severely imperils both life and health.
Systematic complexity fragments, colonizes, debases daily life. Division of labor, its motor, diminishes humanness in its very depths, dis-abling and pacifying us. This de-skilling specialization, which gives us the illusion of competence, is a key, enabling predicate of domestication.
Before domestication, Ernest Gellner (Sword, Plow and Book, 1989) noted, “there simply was no possibility of a growth in scale and in complexity of the division of labour and social differentiation.” Of course, there is still an enforced consensus that a “regression” from civilization would entail too high a cost — bolstered by fictitious scary scenarios, most of them resembling nothing so much as the current products of modernity.
People have begun to interrogate modernity. Already a specter is haunting its now crumbling façade. In the 1980s, Jurgen Habermas feared that the “ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of premodernity,” had already attained some popularity. A great tide of such thinking seems all but inevitable, and is beginning to resonate in popular films, novels, music, zines, TV shows, etc.
And it is also a sad fact that accumulated damage has caused a widespread loss of optimism and hope. Refusal to break with the totality crowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Only visions completely undefined by the current reality constitute our first steps to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the enemy’s terms. (This position may appear extreme; 19th century abolitionism also appeared extreme when its adherents declared that only an end to slavery was acceptable, and that reforms were pro-slavery.)
Marx understood modern society as a state of “permanent revolution,” in perpetual, innovating movement. Postmodernity brings more of the same, as accelerating change renders everything human (such as our closest relationships) frail and undone. The reality of this motion and fluidity has been raised to a virtue by postmodern thinkers, who celebrate undecidability as a universal condition. All is in flux, and context-free; every image or viewpoint is as ephemeral and as valid as any other.
This outlook is the postmodern totality, the position from which postmodernists condemn all other viewpoints. Postmodernism’s historic ground is unknown to itself, because of a founding aversion to overviews and totalities. Unaware of Kaczynski’s central idea (Industrial Society and Its Future, 1996) that meaning and freedom are progressively banished by modern technological society, postmodernists would be equally uninterested in the fact that Max Weber wrote the same thing almost a century before. Or that the movement of society, so described, is the historical truth of what postmodernists analyze so abstractly, as if it were a novelty they alone (partially) understand.
Shrinking from any grasp of the logic of the system as a whole, via a host of forbidden areas of thought, the anti-totality stance of these embarrassing frauds is ridiculed by a reality that is more totalized and global than ever. The surrender of the postmodernists is an exact reflection of feelings of helplessness that pervade the culture. Ethical indifference and aesthetic self-absorption join hands with moral paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resistance. It is no surprise that a non-Westerner such as Ziauddin Sardan (Postmodernism and the Other, 1998) judges that postmodernism “preserves — indeed enhances — all the classical and modern structures of oppression and domination.”
This prevailing fashion of culture may not enjoy much more of a shelf life. It is, after all, only the latest retail offering in the marketplace of representation. By its very nature, symbolic culture generates distance and mediation, supposedly inescapable burdens of the human condition. The self has always only been a trick of language, says Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than the modes through which language autonomously passes, Derrida informs us.
The outcome of the imperialism of the symbolic is the sad commonplace that human embodiment plays no essential role in the functions of mind or reason. Conversely, it’s vital to rule out the possibility that things have ever been different. Postmodernism resolutely bans the subject of origins, the notion that we were not always defined and reified by symbolic culture. Computer simulation is the latest advance in representation, its disembodied power fantasies exactly paralleling modernity’s central essence.
The postmodernist stance refuses to admit stark reality, with discernible roots and essential dynamics. Benjamin’s “storm” of progress is pressing forward on all fronts. Endless aesthetic-textual evasions amount to rank cowardice. Thomas Lamarre serves up a typical postmodern apologetic on the subject: “Modernity appears as a process or rupture and reinscription; alternative modernities entail an opening of otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or reinscribing it. It is as if modernity itself is deconstruction.” (Impacts of Modernities, 2004).
Except that it isn’t, as if anyone needed to point that out. Alas, deconstruction and detotalization have nothing in common. Deconstruction plays its role in keeping the whole system going, which is a real catastrophe, the actual, ongoing one.
The era of virtual communication coincides with the postmodern abdication, an age of enfeebled symbolic culture. Weakened and cheapened connectivity finds its analogue in the fetishization of ever-shifting, debased textual “meaning.” Swallowed in an environment that is more and more one immense aggregate of symbols, deconstruction embraces this prison and declares it to be the only possible world. But the depreciation of the symbolic, including illiteracy and a cynicism about narrative in general, may lead in the direction of bringing the whole civilizational project into question. Civilization’s failure at this most fundamental level is becoming as clear as its deadly and multiplying personal, social, and environmental effects.
“Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists,” predicted Georges Bataille. Language and the symbolic are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, according to Derrida and the rest. Yet we see at the same time an ever-diminishing vista of understanding. The seeming paradox of an engulfing dimension of representation and a shrinking amount of meaning finally causes the former to become susceptible — first to doubt, then to subversion.
Husserl tried to establish an approach to meaning based on respecting experience/ phenomena just as it is delivered to us, before it is re-presented by the logic of symbolism. Small surprise that this effort has been a central target of postmodernists, who have understood the need to extirpate such a vision. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this opposition succinctly, decreeing that “We have no idea, no memory, no presentiment of a world that holds man [sic] in its bosom” (The Birth to Presence, 1993). How desperately do those who collaborate with the reigning nightmare resist the fact that during the two million years before civilization, this earth was precisely a place that did not abandon us and did hold us to its bosom.
Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking. Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The “time” of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight. Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence.
It is language that speaks, in Heidegger’s phrase. But was it always so? This world is over-full of images, simulations — a result of choices that may seem irreversible. A species has, in a few thousand years, destroyed community and created a ruin. A ruin called culture. The bonds of closeness to the earth and to each other — outside of domestication, cities, war, etc. — have been sundered, but can they not heal?
Under the sign of a unitary civilization, the possibly fatal onslaught against anything alive and distinctive has been fully unleashed for all to see. Globalization has in fact only intensified what was underway well before modernity. The tirelessly systematized colonization and uniformity, first set in motion by the decision to control and tame, now has enemies who see it for what it is and for the ending it will surely bring, unless it is defeated. The choice at the beginning of history was, as now, that of presence versus representation.
Gadamer describes medicine as, at base, the restoration of what belongs to nature. Healing as removing whatever works against life’s wonderful capacity to renew itself. The spirit of anarchy, I believe, is similar. Remove what blocks our way and it’s all there, waiting for us.
John Zerzan: Elements of Refusal (1988)
although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, the
changeover involved a monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan! Against Hisstory!
is unrivaled on this, vastly enriching Toynbee’s attention to the “internal” and “external
proletariats,” discontents within and without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from
digging stick farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems, an almost
total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
The formation and storage of surpluses are part of the domesticating will to control and make
static, an aspect of the tendency to symbolize. A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus
takes the forms of herd animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of
equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of wealth in the shape of
storable grains do the gradations of labor and social classes proceed. While there were
certainly wild grains before all this (and wild wheat, by the way, is 24 percent protein compared
to 12 percent for domesticated wheat) the bias of culture makes every difference. Civilization
and its cities rested as much on granaries as on symbolization.
The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more impenetrable in light of the recent
reversal of long-standing notions that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an
absence of leisure. “One could no longer assume,” wrote Arme, “that early man domesticated
plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If anything, the contrary appeared true,
and the advent of farming saw the end of innocence.” For a long time, the question was “why
wasn’t agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?” More recently, we know that
agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a
higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base.” Thus the consensus question now
is, “why was it adopted at all?”
Many theories have been advanced, none convincingly. Childe and others argue that
population increase pushed human societies into more intimate contact with other species,
leading to domestication and the need to produce in order to feed the additional people. But it
has been shown rather conclusively that population increase did not precede agriculture but
was caused by it. “I don’t see any evidence anywhere in the world,” concluded Flannery, “that
suggest that population pressure was responsible for the beginning of agriculture.” Another
theory has it that major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,000
years ago, which upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world and led directly to the cultivation of
certain surviving staples. Recent dating methods have helped demolish this approach; no
such climatic shift happened that could have forced the new mode into existence. Besides,
there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted or refused in every type of climate.
Another major hypothesis is that agriculture was introduced via a chance discovery or
invention as if it had never occurred to the species before a certain moment that, for example,
food grows from sprouted seeds. It seems certain that Paleolithic humanity had a virtually
inexhaustible knowledge of flora and fauna for many tens of thousands of years before the
cultivation of plants began, which renders this theory especially weak.
Agreement with Carl Sauer’s summation that, “Agriculture did not originate from a growing or
chronic shortage of food” is sufficient, in fact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that
have been advanced. A remaining idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food
production began at base as a religious activity. This hypothesis comes closest to plausibility.
Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to have been widely used in
religious ceremonies, and to have been raised in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes.
Before they were domesticated, moreover, sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes.
The main use of the hen in southeastern Asia and the eastern Mediterranean the earliest
centers of civilization “seems to have been,” according to Darby, “sacrificial or divinatory rather
than alimentary.” Sauer adds that the “egg laying and meat producing qualities” of tamed fowl
“are relatively late consequences of their domestication.” Wild cattle were fierce and
dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the modified meat texture of such castrates could
have been foreseen. Cattle were not milked until centuries after their initial captivity, and
representations indicate that their first known harnessing was to wagons in religious
processions.
Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar backgrounds so far as is known. Consider the
New World examples of squash and pumpkin, used originally as ceremonial rattles.
Johannessen discussed the religious and mystical motives connected with the domestication
of maize, Mexico’s most important crop and center of its native Neolithic religion. Likewise
Anderson investigated the selection and development of distinctive types of various cultivated
plants because of their magical significance. The shamans, I should add, were well-placed in
positions of power to introduce agriculture via the taming and planting involved in ritual and
religion, sketchily referred to above.
Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has been somewhat overlooked,
it brings us, in my opinion, to the very doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of
production: that non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of time,
language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and psychic life in agriculture.
“Religion” is too narrow a conceptualization of this infection and its growth. Domination is too
weighty, too all-encompassing, to have been solely conveyed by the pathology that is religion.
But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of religion are certainly part of
agriculture, and from the beginning. Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily,
Anderson studied the very primitive agriculturists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their variety of
corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant. True to culture, showing that it is
complete from the beginning of production, the Naga kept their varieties so pure “only by a
fanatical adherence to an ideal type.” This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production
in domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.
The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the domesticating of animals,
which also defies natural selection and re-establishes the controllable organic world at a
debased, artificial level. Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a cow, for
instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass into milk. Transmuted from a
state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, these animals become completely dependent on
man for survival. In domestic mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively
smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to activity.
Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most domesticated of herd animals; the
remarkable intelligence of wild sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social
relationships among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials.
Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed, and the animal’s
very capacity to recognize its own species is impaired.
Farming also created the potential for rapid environmental destruction and the domination
over nature soon began to turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization
into barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have changed their aspect completely,” estimates
Zeuner, “always to quasi-drier condition, since the beginnings of the Neolithic.” Deserts now
occupy most of the areas where the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much
historical evidence that these early formations inevitably ruined their environments.
Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East and Asia, agriculture
turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry, and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato
described Attica as “a skeleton wasted by disease,” referring to the deforestation of Greece
and contrasting it to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the first domesticated
ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece, Lebanon, and North Africa, and the
desertification of the Roman and Mesopotamian empires.
Another, more immediate impact of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years,
involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researches show that “the
diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their
health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.”
Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number
of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much
more costly in terms of human labor expended.”
The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as
does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition” caused by the changeover from food
gathering to food production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised.
Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of Florida Indian fathers
seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people
died in their 30’s and 40’s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and
severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age only
fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in
Paleolithic times humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks were passed. DeVries is
correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization.
“Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic
plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single
greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of
agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of
domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental caries, and mental
disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no
difficulty and little or no pain.
People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R. H. Post, have heard a
single-engined plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see four moons of
Jupiter with the naked eye. The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall
decline in the quality - and probably in the length - of human life among farmers as compared
with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated.
One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of
innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil,
which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of the huntergatherers
and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been
that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.
The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human
experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney,
prehistoric peoples found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas “All
civilizations,” Wenke reminds us, have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six
plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.”
It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are
actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The world’s population now depends
for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are
replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods
increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed worldwide so that an Inuit
Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin
or frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such as
Unilever, the world’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated
service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an everincreasing
consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is
the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was
set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingers in the
person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounces that
our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer re-cross a certain threshold of civilization
and once again become part of a natural habitat. He further states, expressing perfectly the
original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, “As the earth in its primitive state is not
adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.”
The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at base all
mass production is farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks
of the mid-American prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plow in order to cut
through the soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris,
in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin
Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once.
Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical
corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the world’s
seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to
consumption.
pp. 6873
Lynn Clive: “Birds Combat Civilization” (1985)
Humankind truly was not meant to fly, and birds keep trying to tell us so. As people and their
flying machines continue to overpopulate the skies, not only do plane-to-plane collisions
increase, but bird to plane collisions drastically increase as well, especially since new
technology has created sleeker and quieter engines which sneak up on birds and scarcely
give them any warning of their approach. Needless to say, it is the birds which must attempt to
change their natural flight patterns to avoid fatal collisions.
Seagulls have become a particularly confounding nuisance to airport officials in Michigan. As
their natural feeding grounds along the Great Lakes become more and more polluted, they
drift inland. Wet runways peppered with worms and grasshoppers provide a perfect new
feeding ground for seagulls. Cherry Capital Airport near Traverse City has reported large
flocks of seagulls, as many as 150 at a time.
Approximately 1,200 plane-bird collisions occur each year, causing $2030 million in damage.
Such collisions prove fatal for the birds, of course; however, they have also been responsible
for many aircraft crashes fatal to human beings. Sixty-two people were killed in 1960 near
Boston when a propeller-driven plane sucked in several starlings and lost power.
Birds seem to be waging all-out war against the U.S. Air Force. In 1983, it reported 2,300 bird
collisions; and 300 of these each caused more than $1,000 in damage. This past summer in
Great Britain, a U.S. Air Force crew was forced to bail out of their F-111 jet when a 12-pound
goose smashed into the protective covering on the nose of the jet. The jet, worth $30.9 million,
is now quietly at rest on the bottom of the North Sea.
So what does civilized man do to combat the situation? In Traverse City, airport employees
run around the airfield chasing gulls away with “cracker shells” fired from shotguns. They play
tapes on loudspeakers of the cries of wounded seagulls, and they’re considering putting up
hawk silhouettes to see if that might do the trick. Someone has invented something called a
“chicken gun” or a “rooster booster” which hurls four-pound chicken carcasses into the
windshields of aircraft at speeds over 500 mph to test their strength against bird collisions.
These tests are presently taking place on Air Force jets.
BASH (Bird Air Strike Hazard Team) was organized by the U.S. Air Force in 1975 after three
F-111 jets were lost due to bird collisions. This team, made up of Air Force biologists, travels
to U.S. bases around the world, targeting bird troublespots and trying to come up with
innovative ideas (like the rooster booster) to deal with the problem.
Modern industrial-technological civilizations are based on and geared to the destruction of the
natural order. They pollute the air and feeding grounds of wildlife; they chase birds from the
skies. They construct buildings like the Renaissance Center in Detroit with mirror-like
reflective shells which confuse birds and cause them to crash into them.
As our buildings grow taller and as we fly higher and higher, as we overpopulate our skies with
our deadly contrivances, we lose sight of our true and now former place on the earth. We
myopically look only at tomorrow. We can marvel at the exquisite beauty of a single bird
through a pair of binoculars and then, with the same eye, turn and marvel at a newly
constructed skyscraper or a supersonic jetman’s artifices which are responsible for killing
flocks of such birds.
If anyone were to suggest to the BASH team that the best way to stop bird-plane collisions
would be to stop flying altogether, they would, of course, think you insane or perhaps “birdbrained.”
But what is so bad about bird brains? If we acknowledge the message our bird
cousins are sending us, maybe it isn’t such a bad idea after all.
in Fifth Estate, Summer 1985, p. 6
Arnold DeVries: Primitive Man and His Food (1952)
The defective state of modern man has had its effects upon medicine and the very study of
disease. Dr. E.A. Hooton, the distinguished physical anthropologist of Harvard, has remarked
that “it is a very myopic medical science which works backward from the morgue rather than
forward from the cradle.” Yet this is exactly what the customary procedure of medicine has
been. The reasons have been somewhat of necessity, it is to be admitted, for one can
scarcely study health when the adequate controls are not present. In civilization one studies
civilized people, and the frequency of the forms of degeneration which are found then
determine what we consider normal and abnormal. As a result, conditions which generally
form no part of undomesticated animal life are regarded as normal and necessary for the
human species. So long has disease been studied that the physician often has little concept
as to what health actually is. We live in a world of pathology, deformity and virtual physical
monstrosity, which has so colored our thinking that we cannot visualize the nature of health
and the conditions necessary for its presence.
The question should then logically arise: why not leave civilization and study physical
conditions in the primitive world? If perfect physical specimens could here be found, the study
could be constructive and progressive, giving suggestions, perhaps, as to the conditions which
permitted or induced a state of physical excellence to exist. We might then find out what man
is like, biologically speaking, when he does not need a doctor, which might also indicate what
he should be like when the doctor has finished with him.
Fortunately the idea has not been entirely neglected. Primitive races were carefully observed
and described by many early voyagers and explorers who found them in their most simple and
natural state. Primitive life has also very carefully been observed and studied with the object of
understanding social, moral or religious conditions, in which, however, incidental observations
were made too with respect to the physical condition of the people, and the living habits which
might affect that condition. Others, in modern life, have studied the savages with the specific
object of determining their physical state of health, and the mode of living which is associated
therewith.
The results of such work have been very significant, but regarding medicine and nutrition in
actual practice, they have been almost entirely neglected. The common view that primitive
man is generally short lived and subject to many diseases is often held by physician as well as
layman, and the general lack of sanitation, modern treatment, surgery and drugs in the
primitive world is thought to prevent maintenance of health at a high physical level. For the
average nutritionist it is quite natural to feel that any race not having access to the wide variety
of foods which modern agriculture and transportation now permit could not be in good health.
These assumptions have helped to determine existing therapeutic methods, and they have
largely prevented serious consideration that might be based upon factual data.
But the facts are known, and these comprise a very interesting and important story. They
indicate that, when living under near-isolated conditions, apart from civilization and without
access to the foods of civilization, primitive man lives in much better physical condition than
does the usual member of civilized society. When his own nutrition is adequate and complete,
as it often is, he maintains complete immunity to dental caries. His teeth are white and
sparkling, with neither brushing nor cleansing agents used, and the dental arch is broad, with
the teeth formed in perfect alignment.
The facial and body development is also good. The face is finely formed, well-set and broad.
The body is free from deformity and proportioned as beauty and symmetry would indicate
desirable. The respective members of the racial group reproduce in homogeneity from one
generation to the next. There are few deviations from the standard anthropological prototype.
One individual resembles the other in facial form, looking much like sisters or brothers, with
the chief differences in appearance being in size.
Reproductive efficiency is such as to permit parturition with no difficulty and little or no pain.
There are no prenatal deformities. Resistance to infectious disease is high, few individuals
being sick, and these usually rapidly recovering. The degenerative diseases are rare, even in
advanced life, some of them being completely unknown and unheard of by the primitive.
Mental complaints are equally rare, and the state of happiness and contentment is one
scarcely known by civilized man. The duration of life is long, the people being yet strong and vigorous as they pass the proverbial three score and ten mark, and living in many cases
beyond a century.
These are the characteristics of the finest and most healthful primitive races, who live under
the most ideal climatic and nutritional conditions. Primitive races less favored by environment
are less successful in meeting weakness and disease, but even the poorest of these have
better teeth and skeletal development than civilized man, and they usually present other
physical advantages as well.
The experience of primitive man has therefore been one of great importance. We note that
people living today, under the culture and environment of the Stone Age, have not only
equalled but far surpassed civilized man in strength, physical development and immunity to
disease. The mere existence of this fact poses an important question to modern medicine
and should arouse serious thought and consideration.
Of equal significance is the fact that the good health of the primitive has been possible only
under conditions of relative isolation. As soon as his contact with civilization is sufficient to
alter his dietary habits, he succumbs to disease very readily and loses all of the unique
immunity of the past. The teeth decay; facial form ceases to be uniform; deformities become
common; reproductive efficiency is lowered; mental deficiency develops; and the duration of
life is sharply lowered.
It would hence appear that the nutritional habits of primitive man are responsible for his state
of health. So long as the native foods remain in use, there are no important physical changes,
and the bacterial scourges are absent, even though a complete lack of sanitation would
indicate that pathogenic bacteria might be present. With a displacement of native foods for
those of modern commerce the situation changes completely, and the finest sanitation that the
white man can provide, together with the best in medical services, is of no avail in preventing
the epidemics which take thousands of lives. Among scientists who have studied at first hand
both the physical condition and food of many primitive races, the close relationship between
the two has been clearly recognized.
pp. 47
source: "Against Civilization" - John Zerzan
disease. Dr. E.A. Hooton, the distinguished physical anthropologist of Harvard, has remarked
that “it is a very myopic medical science which works backward from the morgue rather than
forward from the cradle.” Yet this is exactly what the customary procedure of medicine has
been. The reasons have been somewhat of necessity, it is to be admitted, for one can
scarcely study health when the adequate controls are not present. In civilization one studies
civilized people, and the frequency of the forms of degeneration which are found then
determine what we consider normal and abnormal. As a result, conditions which generally
form no part of undomesticated animal life are regarded as normal and necessary for the
human species. So long has disease been studied that the physician often has little concept
as to what health actually is. We live in a world of pathology, deformity and virtual physical
monstrosity, which has so colored our thinking that we cannot visualize the nature of health
and the conditions necessary for its presence.
The question should then logically arise: why not leave civilization and study physical
conditions in the primitive world? If perfect physical specimens could here be found, the study
could be constructive and progressive, giving suggestions, perhaps, as to the conditions which
permitted or induced a state of physical excellence to exist. We might then find out what man
is like, biologically speaking, when he does not need a doctor, which might also indicate what
he should be like when the doctor has finished with him.
Fortunately the idea has not been entirely neglected. Primitive races were carefully observed
and described by many early voyagers and explorers who found them in their most simple and
natural state. Primitive life has also very carefully been observed and studied with the object of
understanding social, moral or religious conditions, in which, however, incidental observations
were made too with respect to the physical condition of the people, and the living habits which
might affect that condition. Others, in modern life, have studied the savages with the specific
object of determining their physical state of health, and the mode of living which is associated
therewith.
The results of such work have been very significant, but regarding medicine and nutrition in
actual practice, they have been almost entirely neglected. The common view that primitive
man is generally short lived and subject to many diseases is often held by physician as well as
layman, and the general lack of sanitation, modern treatment, surgery and drugs in the
primitive world is thought to prevent maintenance of health at a high physical level. For the
average nutritionist it is quite natural to feel that any race not having access to the wide variety
of foods which modern agriculture and transportation now permit could not be in good health.
These assumptions have helped to determine existing therapeutic methods, and they have
largely prevented serious consideration that might be based upon factual data.
But the facts are known, and these comprise a very interesting and important story. They
indicate that, when living under near-isolated conditions, apart from civilization and without
access to the foods of civilization, primitive man lives in much better physical condition than
does the usual member of civilized society. When his own nutrition is adequate and complete,
as it often is, he maintains complete immunity to dental caries. His teeth are white and
sparkling, with neither brushing nor cleansing agents used, and the dental arch is broad, with
the teeth formed in perfect alignment.
The facial and body development is also good. The face is finely formed, well-set and broad.
The body is free from deformity and proportioned as beauty and symmetry would indicate
desirable. The respective members of the racial group reproduce in homogeneity from one
generation to the next. There are few deviations from the standard anthropological prototype.
One individual resembles the other in facial form, looking much like sisters or brothers, with
the chief differences in appearance being in size.
Reproductive efficiency is such as to permit parturition with no difficulty and little or no pain.
There are no prenatal deformities. Resistance to infectious disease is high, few individuals
being sick, and these usually rapidly recovering. The degenerative diseases are rare, even in
advanced life, some of them being completely unknown and unheard of by the primitive.
Mental complaints are equally rare, and the state of happiness and contentment is one
scarcely known by civilized man. The duration of life is long, the people being yet strong and vigorous as they pass the proverbial three score and ten mark, and living in many cases
beyond a century.
These are the characteristics of the finest and most healthful primitive races, who live under
the most ideal climatic and nutritional conditions. Primitive races less favored by environment
are less successful in meeting weakness and disease, but even the poorest of these have
better teeth and skeletal development than civilized man, and they usually present other
physical advantages as well.
The experience of primitive man has therefore been one of great importance. We note that
people living today, under the culture and environment of the Stone Age, have not only
equalled but far surpassed civilized man in strength, physical development and immunity to
disease. The mere existence of this fact poses an important question to modern medicine
and should arouse serious thought and consideration.
Of equal significance is the fact that the good health of the primitive has been possible only
under conditions of relative isolation. As soon as his contact with civilization is sufficient to
alter his dietary habits, he succumbs to disease very readily and loses all of the unique
immunity of the past. The teeth decay; facial form ceases to be uniform; deformities become
common; reproductive efficiency is lowered; mental deficiency develops; and the duration of
life is sharply lowered.
It would hence appear that the nutritional habits of primitive man are responsible for his state
of health. So long as the native foods remain in use, there are no important physical changes,
and the bacterial scourges are absent, even though a complete lack of sanitation would
indicate that pathogenic bacteria might be present. With a displacement of native foods for
those of modern commerce the situation changes completely, and the finest sanitation that the
white man can provide, together with the best in medical services, is of no avail in preventing
the epidemics which take thousands of lives. Among scientists who have studied at first hand
both the physical condition and food of many primitive races, the close relationship between
the two has been clearly recognized.
pp. 47
source: "Against Civilization" - John Zerzan
domenica 30 marzo 2014
Gather
Three or four years ago, when i started to embrace the straight edge movement, i was hungry for bands with extremely political backgrounds and attitudes, i was sick of all those senseless mosh fashion hardcore songs about friendship and brotherhood and at the same time i was tired of dbeat bands with boring songs about nuclear apocalypses, then i wanted to search something new and give a rest to my Conflict and Aus Rotten collection... That was the time i started to listen to some vegan straight edge bands, and among these bands there was one in particular that blew me off: Gather. I still remember the first time i listened to them, it was a video of Total Liberation on youtube with pictures about animal exploitation, i immediately searched the lyrics of that song, and i was surprised to read something like that, i was used to anti-vivisection songs and stuff like that, but finally someone went through the limits of animal rights lyrics embracing the theory that sexism, racism, homophobia, and speciesism are branches of the same problem: anthropocentrism, which is marked in the part "after 10,000 years of telling lies" as the result of domestication, civilization and agriculture. I know that a lot of vegan straight edge bands used to speak about this issue in the past (see Earth Crisis, Chokehold and so on), but my knowledge of that subculture was still basic.
Great lyrics, sick breakdowns, angry voice, metalcore riffs, they mixed anarcho punk backgrounds with a more violent attitude, and where the band of Crass records taught me to open the eyes, Gather arrived as a punch in the face and helped me to stand up from my weak knees and apathy.
The 7" starts with "Done and Done", a fast song against Damien Moyal of Culture but it applies to those who once used to wave the flag of veganism and straight edge, turning then to consumers of mass murder.
"No Contest" explains how much is important to act to defend and liberate the innocents and the oppressed, and how much is useless to see a meat-free diet as the final goal. Best part i think is where they throw in the middle of the song a part of "Wrath of Insanity" by Earth Crisis (the guitarist Scott Crouse produced the 7").
"Escalate" criticize the empty part of the straight edge movement, characterized by apolitical people interested in talking about how much they are better than you because they have x´s on their hands. In my eyes maybe a teasing against all those boring youthcrew bands? (no offense, i love Have Heart and Champion too).
"I Hate Ayn Rand" is the only one that i didnt like in the first place. The song talks about selfishness and its consequences, but i kinda refused that concept because of my former anarcho-individualist ideas.
In 2005 they shared a split with another GREAT band from California called Seven Generations. The ep contains "New Forms", which speaks about how state and capitalism destroy our autonomy, individuality and freedom. "Who Belongs" one of my favorite songs (re-recorded then for Beyond The Ruins, with guest vocals), against the abhorrent sexism and machismo in punk and hardcore. How many times we hear words like "bitch", "pussy" or we are witnesses of male-centred attitudes who denigrate womyn? and this happens even in places that should be safe and free from hierarchies (anarchist collectives, hardcore and other alternative subcultures) "There's still a need for feminism, there was never any liberation. Given freedom to be consumerists is not a radical movement."
In the spring of 2006 they recorded "Beyond The Ruins" released by xCatalystx records, and is with this album that i completely felt in love with them, seriously.. everything in this full length is perfect, i could listen to it 4 times in a row everyday without getting tired of it!!!
"Green Scare" doesnt need explanations, we already know what it is, and as long as there is injustice....
"Dollar Signs to The Industry" talks about the torture, the pain and suffering that dairy industries inflict on cows and their babies.
In "Crimson Dawn" (written by Lasse, former singer of Purified in Blood) they used a part of "Monster", a movie about Aileen Wuornos, as intro ("We can be as different as we wanna be, but you can't kill people! SAYS WHO?") and a quote by Bernardine Dohrn -member of The Weather Underground Organization in the early 70s- in the middle of the song: "There's no way to be committed to non-violence in the most violent society that history has ever created. I'm not committed to non-violence in any way.". The riffs of this song are purely awesome..
"Glimpses of Hope" well..read the lyrics.
"Power, Privilege and Wealth" is about how white supremacy culture is nothing but a crutch for multinational corporations who exploit third world countries and poor communities for their profit..
"And I know how you were raised, alright? And I know how people fuckin' think out there, and fuck, it's gotta be that way. They've gotta tell you that 'Thou shall not kill' shit and all of that. But that's not the way the world works, Selby. Cuz I'm out there every fuckin' day living it. People kill each other every day and for what? Hm? For politics, for religion, and THEY'RE HEROES! No, no... there's a lot of shit I can't do anymore, but killing's not one of them. And letting those fucking bastards go out and rape someone else isn't either!" another quote from the movie Monster, used for the intro of my favorite song of the album "Changed Minds", a powerful song about how patriarchy dominates the judicial system and how the state and its deviated culture control our autonomy. This reminds me of an afro american transgender woman sentenced in 2012 to 41 months in prison (released then in 2014) for stabbing to death a man after a racist, homophobic and transphobic attack against her and her friends in Minnesota.
"Domestication" is inspired by Ishmael , i totally love it and it gives me goosebumps, especially because this song addresses issues like agriculture, civilization and destruction of the earth, themes that are overly underrated by the animal rights and vegan movements/individuals, who often forget and deny the importance of rewilding and primitivism. "It's not so different from the factory farms where animals are confined"
"Chained to Weakness" makes a connection between monotheist religions and mind slavery.
The last song of the album is "Justice Coming", a cover from a 90s band called Framework, the bonus track includes a quote from the documentary-movie "Earthlings".
Oh and yeah, Gather was formed by Eva - vocals, Dustin (her brother) - drums, Randy - bass, Allan - guitar.
Probably those who will read this review and already know Gather, will put their records on to remember how great they were...
For those who don´t know them yet, download the link below, read the interviews and the lyrics, and i hope you will love them like i do!
ps check the blog of this guy i know about his gather´s collection of merchandise and music,
http://xtotalvliberationx.blogspot.de/
Gather Discography
TOTAL LIBERATION LYRICS.
1. Done and Done
Perpetuating insecurity / Sexism won't be taken lightly / Trend hopper - you're not fooling anybody / Murderer - betraying the animals / Drinker - betraying your own morals / Now you'll have to face the monster you helped create
2. No Contest
No one should have to ask for their life/let alone fight for it/we forget how dire the situation's become/because we are not the ones effected first hand/we're too comfortable! But the animals are defenseless so we must treat this war as our own/I too slip into the comfort of my own life everyday but the guilt cannot be absolved/no matter how much I wish it didnt have to be this way/No revolution will occur unless we act up/The animals need an army to fight for them/See how useless your pacifist views are now?/as long as I sit here, animals will be killed/veganism is crucial but we can't wait for the world to change their diets-(that's futile)/(my diet) prevents some slaughter but the fact still remains that billions are dying everyday/the only way to stop this is to physically set them free/saying you won't support this is saying you don't care/(ExC part) I refuse to turn my back, I refuse to shut my eyes/steadfast against the deluge of evil of man's devise/the quest of their freedom won't cease until it's won/reconcile your sins or you blood will have to run/to say we can legally win this war is insanity/if it were another human holocaust we'd be preparing for battle undoubtfully/you cant deny the suffering that is their every day lives/there are no rules in this fight/there's no action to harsh when the result is their liberation/"Fear" is crushed by the greatest sense of urgency and necessity/rationality? The case is inarguable!/persist or perish/join the struggle or watch their lives crumble/your faith in peace will lead off to cease/if we could have the masses on our side/then we wouldn't have to fight but we are the minority!/there is no contest-your tactic is bound to lead us into defeat
3. Escalate
Straight Edge cannot be considered the final goal / but in order to achieve the things that count the most, we must use it as a tool. / There is more to it than simply being drug free / it's the clarity of mind to act most effectively against this system we're fighting / It's the first step, it's the key to unlock you from your apathy / but if you stop at that, you're just a waste to me / You've broken your addiction, but now you just sit / as stagnant as a passed out frat-boy - you're no threat! / I know plenty of Christian who don't drink / Do they deserve praise for being revolutionary? NO! / Do you really believe that Straight Edge alone is going to do shit? / If drugs are the reason everyone's so passive, use your sobriety to act! / Do you think it's just about health? / The how does it effect anyone but you? / Now that you're liberated, what are you going to do? / Merely Straight Edge - not enough! / Merely Straight Edge - step it up! / If you think that we have things in common just because we both wear X's on our hands, you're wrong! / We both may abstain from substances, but that is not enough to make a bond.
4. I Hate Ayn Rand
'Individualism' is the mentality that you don't owe anyone anything. / "Don't tell me how to live my life and i won't tell you how to live yours" - Fuck that / Manifestation of living in a capitalist system / Everyone is just looking our for themselves / We shun and ignore the one that need our help / But our action affect everyone around us / And the choices we make have very real consequences / And the thing you demand and the things you take for granted... / Convenience for you could be the result of another's life / Step out of you little world... And open your eyes and your hearts! / A luxury for you could be the result of another's suffering / Can you trace the origins of what you consume back to torture and abuse?/ Never stop questiong / The unexamined life is not worth living / This is not PC chit chat / This is what it is to be a human being / Taking shortcuts to happiness / will not bring you a lifetime of fulfillment
5. Total Liberation
for every life for liberation / we're dedicated to bringing freedom for all enslaved / tear the blindfold from over your eyes / forget all that you thought you once knew / after 10, 000 years of telling lies / dedicated to spreading the truth / taking pride in this path that we tread / in defense of the earth / speaking out so the words of the voiceless can finally be heard / now's the time to take action for freedom / and justice deserved / FIGHT FOR LIFE / take a stand / for truth and compassion / there's no time to wait for change / show dedication / through your words and your actions / together we can end their suffering / TOTAL LIBERATION / smash hierarchy / don't buy into authority / strive for sustainability / resources are running out / discontent because we're not free / oppressors act out of greed / compassion and equality / are both necessary / reject the myths we were taught to believe / it's time to deprogram ourselves / question stereotypes and traditions / follow no gods, no masters / look at the root of racism, sexism, speciesism / and you'll see, it's all been fabricated to keep us apart / BREAK DOWN / THE BARRIERS / THAT ENSLAVE US ALL
SPLIT W/ 7GENERATIONS.
1. New Forms
No choices of our own, we've been assigned our roles from day one / Don't even know our own interests, never had the chance to discover what inspires us / Told that what we're taught in school is all that's worthy to pursue / Interests outside of it have no value, if it doesn't motivate you, "there must be something wrong with you"/ Spend all our time dedicated to the very few options given, outside of those narrow guidelines, we can hardly imagine there's anything more! No work today and it's bright outside but you don't know what to do now that you have your own free time / The TV has always been there to pacify and keep you from asking "what do I really like?" / So many years of buying the lies that through "production" is the only way we can feel satisfied / "If you're not earning money for the system you're wasting your time" but what answer will we find if we ask why? Aren't we just wasting our time for someone else just like slaves? / Fooling ourselves that we need it, that we should enjoy it, or at least accept it / Each day on the job we're being robbed! / They keep our food under lock and key to force us to operate this machine / Slaves were used to build this civilization surely our rules didn't want to end this tradition / It just changed forms, but we're still under their control! / Chattel slavery got too costly to provide food and shelter for their property / [Now They] leave that up to us and make us dependent they don't worry about us running away because we go to them / Is this all there is to life? Is this supposed to give me a purpose? / I would rather die than submit to that lie!
BEYOND THE RUINS.
1. The Green Scare
Fear the Green Scare, the new Red Scare / "the number one domestic terrorism threat" / But it's no accident that lives are saved, not harmed in any case / Power and money, the only things at risk / When your power starts to slip, you tighten your grip / Repression from above, an old tactic of control / but as long as there's injustice, expect resistance / A fight against those value freedom is a war you will never win / With phone tapping and harassing, spying and lying / Infiltration, entrapment, you try to weaken their commitment / In the end, is it in your best interest to defend / that which leads to deforestation, extinction, cruelty, brutality? / Intimidate all you want, but the movement is stronger than that / Try to subdue, but the struggle will continue
2. Dollar Signs to the Industry
You brought the myth that they're put here for us / Now see the hell that results from this / Treated so callously as if machines / Objects, mere dollar signs to the industry / Beaten on the head, stunned but not dead / Nose bleeding, confused, so trusting / Chocking under your foot, you hear it gasp for air / Life draining under your weight, struggling, and you don't even care / I watched you rip the skin right off of her body / Still alive, no where to hide, she can't express the fucking pain inside / Others are born into a cage, just to die by the blade / Their short lives in between pure suffering / No pain killers are used while enduring body mutilations / Most are neurotic due to lack of stimulation / Unable to turn around or spread a wing, unable to breathe fresh air, and they'll never be free / I watched you take her baby away, product of her annual rape / He'll be tortured just like her, until they're both murdered / No one to give them comfort, no one to make them feel loved / No happy ending for them, no one mourns her when they're gone / We'll never get to know her personality / Just another number, dead for your greed / Selfishness / Ignorance / Decides the fate of the innocent
3. What You're Thankful For
"Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in grief The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are plattered with gore. The water har turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine. We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead" ...as recalled by a poet of a culture that was wiped out at the hands of the barbarians known as Christians. Invaders of this land, "Murderers of this world". Driven by greed and self-righteousness they brought on the largest holocaust the world has ever known. Babies torn away from loving mother's arms. Thrown to dogs of war, devoured alive. Welcomed them with open arms. Just to have their hands cut off in return. Womyn were raped to prove who dominates. Hanged or burned or disembowled. In God's name, you shall be maimed. From the spread of disease to slavery, to slaughter and still being lied to, history denied. The truth is too depressing, hits too close to home. I blame you, missionaries. I blame the government, I blame every racist objectivist. Fuck the missionaries, fuck the government, fuck every racist objectivist.
4. Who Belongs
How dare you turn a space meant to be about unity into a place that reflects the same old problems we face in society? You claim that there is equality, but have you asked the ones effected by your misogyny? No. There is no excuses for creating an environment where our sisters are made to feel self conscious, insecure, disrespected. Constantly having to prove herself, faced with skepticism and doubt. Being judged twice as hard, ignored but having so much heart. Or, cat calls--humiliating! Being grabbed at--so degrading! For everyone who believes in equality STAND WITH US. For everyone opposed to patriarchy STAND WITH US. Sexism comes in more forms than just violence and rape; certain attitudes and words can alienate. Gender's as arbitrary as race, no tolerance for discrimination in our scene. There's still a need for feminism, there was never any liberation. Given freedom to be consumerists is not a radical movement. And it may not be "cool" to stand against the crowd, DON'T LET THAT HOLD YOU DOWN. Punk is about doing what's right even if it means going against tha majority. This is not just a womyn's issue, it's time for boys and girls alike to take control of this matter, don't stand on the side in this fight. Not one good reason for this sense of exclusion. How did these traditional views get inside and start running the shows here too? Let's FORCE THEM OUT.
5. Crimson Dawn
Gifted child, the demon of creation, reigning from a blood drenched throne / Spreading its wings of devastation, all life will drown / An empire consuming the Earth, draining it for all it's worth / In this world of mourning the truth is dead / Lead astray by greedy eyes, trapped behind a wall of capitalist lies / Blind to the blood on our hands, deaf to the anguished cries / In our complacent sphere omens have passed us by / Now we stand in the brink of our demise / I refuse to stand by and let fools destroy the world as they please / I wage a war to bring them to their knees / My oath doesn't offer the elite any peace / A sword forged to make them bleed / Their death will bring us salvation / Breaking the shackles of oppression / Ending these days of exploration / Hail the crimson dawn of revolution
6. Glimpses of Hope
It's times like these, which come more often than I'd like / when it's almost impossible to look on the brightside / Everything I love, all I hold sacred, is threatened--doomed to be taken / It's rare I see beauty without thinking of it's inevitable end, how so much has been lost, or all that could have been / But I can't forget the glimpses of hope or the ones who refuse to give up / Time and time again, we've seen that a few with dedication can make great change, can bring about liberation / Cages cut open in the night / Animals run free for the first time / An act of love that saves lives / Corporations that seemed untouchable are now exposed and vulnerable / HLS on the brink of collapse due to uncompromising pressure from SHAC / In a world of insensitivity there is hope for the defenseless / The ones who have been caught, and those who remain unseen believe in the cause enough to risk everything / Those who've been caught, those who remain are the ones who will set the world free
7. Power, Privilege, Wealth
This is a country built upon the system of white supremacy where the subjugation of people of color is justified "because it helps the economy". This exploitation has been deemed "necessary" exposing inherent racism in American ideology. "Progress" made doesn't benefit everybody, only the privileged, not the marginalized communities. Our civilization requires many to sacrifice against their own will, nothing in it for them. How can you justify, defend a country that weiws people as merely means to an end? Native American reservations used as nuclear testing sites. Irreversible damage to their land, their health, their lives. Clothes sold in the US made by womyn in Mexico in factories where humyn rights are negligeble. Just like when African slaves were called less-than-humyn so whites wouldn't feel guilty about abusing them. America still uses the mentality that it's ok to oppress nations and people of color for its own gain. To maintain privilege, power, and wealth it depends on keeping others down. The government doesn't care about you. To stay ahead in this world, there's nothing it won't do.
8. Changed Minds
What "order" is being maintained here? To whose benefit are these laws for? Each situation not taken into account, so a racist classist sexist institution of forms. Womyn in prisons for self defense, kills her abuser, she finally fights back. Or a resistant assistant to a forceful man, but "battered womyn's syndrome must be a myth". And so her punishment will be more harsh because she's stepped out of her passive role. Of her own life, she van never have control. Stay helpless, don't try to break the mold. Enforcement of a random "norm" established by people I couldn't despise more. Prisons punish the desperate and those who refuse to conform, to uphold this system's shit, anyone who rejects it is a suspect. But crimes themselves are rarely the problem, they're jsut symptoms of a culture gone terribly wrong. Laws create a dependence on the State, they prevent us from taking matters into our own hands. Meanwhile the mass murderers, environmental destroyers, CEO's and their corporations remain free, their actions unpunished. Prisons never worked in the past, try something new. When will we take back our autonomy? When will we set ourselves free?
9. Domestication
Scars cut deep into the mountainside / Logging hearses carry away the dead / Strip mining, relentless destruction Wildlife forced away to make room for the humyn kingdom / I see fields and fields of agriculture / row after row of monocrops, no diversity / It's not so different from the factory farms where animals are confined / Ownership of people is slavery, ownership of animals is the same thing / But ownership of the land is taken for granted due to generations of blind acceptance / No, you're not free, you never were / But nothing really is, ll is controlled / We're not the only one's having our autonomy stripped / In this Taker culture, anthropocentrism rules / Domestication of all life, the anti-thesis of liberation / We consume, we pollute, we exploit, we ignore / We'll pass on a desolate world where all that grows is what we choose, and all that lives is for our own use / We purchase the land as if it's rightfully ours and don't give a second thought to the lives we destroy / We're the rulers of this prison we've set up for everything / Wild animals and plants trapped in parks an preserves / We're a part of this world, just like everything else but we don't act that way
10. Chained to Weakness
Living a life dictated by faith alone, never questioning the validity of this morality; how much does this really benefit you or the world that surrounds you? This faith leads you to fear your god. Wouldn't you rather follow your desires than cower, impotent before an angry man in the sky that you aren't even sure exists? Paralyzed by fear, directed by your "duty" - submit today, hold out for a reward that will never come, willful slavery that stretches to eternity is this the heaven that awaits you? I renounce your sacrifice of will for conscious ignorance. I will turn my back on your blindness and open my eyes to a life that could be our heaven if we'd recognize the fires burning in our hearts. I'll tear down the holy towers - Unleash flames to cleanse your corrupt morality - Erase these lies from memory and leap into a world where we're the gods of our destiny.
INTERVIEW WITH MAXIMUM ROCK AND ROLL (2005)
MRR: You all have an interesting name for your band. Can you tell me why and how you chose the name Gather?
D: We decided to form as a band right after Total Liberation Fest in January of 2004. Kevin Tucker from the Green Anarchy Collective was there and it was the first time we had heard about hunting animals and eating roadkill in a radical context. We were starting to learn about anti-civilization theory and we were hearing anti-civilization folks talking about eating meat and being hunter-gatherers. So, part of it was emphasizing the “gather” aspect of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
E: Not only emphasizing the gather part, but eliminating the hunter part.
A: There is also another aspect to the name Gather. The double meaning
is that we are hoping to gather the punk and hardcore scenes to really bring about a positive change in our punk rock community.
D: We also wanted a one-word name as a throw back to some of our favorite bands from the mid-nineties, so we thought Gather would be perfect.
MRR: So you all took part in the Total Liberation Tour. Were you involved in the music part of the tour or the activism part of the tour?
E: Both
A: Yeah, both
D: We had just formed as a band in February (2004) right after the Total Liberation Fest in January and we were keeping in touch with the promoter of the tour. MAROON from Germany ended up not being able to come over to the US for the tour, so we were asked to fill in for them on the tour.
A: We were initially invited to go on just the west coast portion of the tour. We were totally excited to be able to tour the west coast with some of our favorite bands, and eventually more and more bands ended up dropping off the entire tour, so we were invited to do the nationwide tour.
E: We played music on the tour, but there was also a lot of activism. We did a lot of SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, http://www.shacamerica.net/) demos and other actions during the tour that we would find out about. The tour was about music, but mainly about trying to get people in the hardcore scene involved in activism as well.
A: It was a music tour to inspire activism in the hardcore scene.
D: There were cities that we visited on the tour where we would find out that like just the day before a paper mill got burned down or something like that. So, it was really warming to come to a city and have activism go on. When we left New York there was a big SHAC demo going on. It was a good excuse for people to get political and it was fucking awesome that it happened to coincide with amazing hardcore music.
MRR: So, who were some of the activists on that tour that were most inspirational to you all?
D: On the tour itself, Brian D. from the Crimethinc (http://www.crimethinc.com/) Collective had some amazing things to say about connecting the freedom that we feel in a punk rock venue to the outside world and keeping that alive. That was inspiring to me.
R: Rod Coronado was definitely huge because he talked about his involvement with the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First!, going to prison for the things that he did, giving up his freedom to save lives. That was really inspiring as well.
E: Andy Stepanian from SHAC was also really inspiring. He talked about his time in prison that he spent for animal rights actions and he drew the connection between human behavior in prison and the behavior of animals in captivity. They go crazy and they get violent. It was interesting to hear the comparisons because we are no different from nonhuman animals put in those same situations. Both the prison system and laboratory animal captivity are equally fucked up.
A: For me, Andy was so inspirational compared with the other political speakers on the tour because he was a lot closer to us in age, and in perspective. I think he was a lot more involved with our daily activities on the tour. It made him a real person to us hardcore punk kids. Not just the political speakers were inspirational. I think that just being together as a band, and with the other bands, we all really collected our efforts to inspire each other.
D: The last guy that I want to acknowledge for inspiring me was Evan from the Coalition Against Civilization (http://www.coalitionagainstcivilization.org/). He spent a lot of time with us. He put up with a lot of shit because he eats roadkill himself. He tried to pretend he wasn’t very much of a hardcore kid, but he would put on the boxing gloves and take the microphone and sing Earth Crisis covers, and so it was just kinda like who the fuck are you kidding? But he was challenging at the same time in some positive ways to me personally. So, yeah, those are some of the people who made the tour what it was. If the tour was a failure in the sense of losing a lot of money, and bands dropping off, it really was, but even if it was just for the 30 kids who stuck it out for the whole 3 weeks, it was an entirely life-changing and motivating event. So, if for nothing else, for those involved, it was a success.
MRR: Some of my first experiences with the hardcore punk scene were with bands that were very political in their views on animal liberation and animal rights, and one thing that struck me about Gather is that you have that same intensity in your live show and in your lyrics that really got me excited about hardcore so many years ago. I have noticed a trend in the past few years where hardcore punk bands including some awesome DIY bands that I looked up to have watered down their lyrics, and their lives shows contain no political content whatsoever. I see a slight resurgence in that radical activism and political aspect of hardcore that I grew up with in bands like Gather and those that were on the Total Liberation Tour. What are your views on the de-politicization of hardcore punk?
R: I only consider bands that have political messages hardcore bands or punk bands. Bands that don’t have anything to say, I don’t consider them hardcore at all. Bands in the “hardcore” scene that don’t say anything – I don’t want to have anything to do with them. All of the bands that I look up to and that I think are hardcore today, really just stick to that traditional way of bringing the important messages into their music and lives as well.
A: There are a lot of bands that you can technically consider “hardcore” because they have distorted guitars and breakdowns and pit calls and they scream, so stylistically, yes, it resembles hardcore.
MRR: So maybe it is hardcore music, but not necessarily a hardcore lifestyle?
A: Oh, for sure. They are emulating a music style, but not necessarily bringing the emotion and political dialogue that I think is essential to hardcore and punk rock.
E: In the explanations in our zine I mention that one of the fundamental aspects that makes punk what it is – is that it’s gotta be a threat to the dominant culture. And when you eliminate that by taking out the politics and just making it about having fun, which is a crucial part, but that’s not all it’s about. When you eliminate the fundamental aspect of punk – then it’s not punk anymore.
A: But that’s not to say that hardcore can’t be fun. I think hardcore should be fun, and fun is definitely crucial. But when you strip the politics away from the music, I think you’re left with nice tunes.
MRR: In your song “Escalate” you sing about straightedge kids and apathy. As an activist oriented straightedge band, what are your views on the current straightedge movement?
A: There are lots of bands out there that play “hardcore” style music, but to us, aren’t hardcore bands. I would say that, most anyone could be straightedge. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re taking a stand against anything really. By definition, yes they may be straightedge because they are not partaking in drug culture, by that doesn’t make them any sort of activist.
E: It is important to take a stand against drug culture because we are overwhelmed with media advertising beer or whatever, so it is a big deal to reject that. But what is the point of keeping a sober mind and healthy body if you’re not gonna use it to somehow better the world? It seems to be a sorta selfish purity thing. If you’re not gonna stand for anything other that abstaining from substances, then what is the point?
MRR: So are you saying that straightedge should be used as a weapon or a tool to better youself?
E: Yeah, its not the end, it’s the means to an end. It’s not like the ultimate goal is to be pure and clean, it’s be pure and clean so that you can be most effective as an activist.
R: Straightedge began as a label for punks who rejected drug culture. The point of being punk is to resist all the forms of oppression that face us every day. So, what it really comes down to is, in order to be straightedge, you have to be an activist too. I’m not one to tell someone they’re not straightedge, but in order to actually be effective as someone who’s straightedge, you need to be an activist.
A: I think a lot of where that song came from was from our own observations here in our scene in Northern California. There are a good number of straightedge kids here. A lot of kids come out to the straightedge shows. We’ve also noticed, at the same time, even though they were straightedge, they could still be sexist, racist, they could still be homophobic and uphold all of these values that we were trying to take a stand against.
D: We realized that kids who were x-ing up didn’t necessarily have anything in common with us just because we also had x’s on the backs of our hands. So these fucking sexist assholes who eat meat and are fucking Christian losers, it was like, why the fuck would I ever want to stand alongside those losers. So, this song is just a call to those people to not be “merely” straightedge as we call it.
A: To me, that song isn’t meant to belittle those people, but to hopefully gain them as an ally. To bring them to a place where they can realize that straightedge can be something that they can use to better their own lives and to take a stand against things that are much greater than their own lives and their own ideas of purity.
R: Yeah, and fuck religion. [laughs]
D: Yeah, Christians stay the fuck out of our scene. [laughs] And I want to say that it looks like veganism is on the upswing in the hardcore scene which is awesome, and we’re gonna do everything we can to perpetuate that, but at the same time we need to take a stand against sexism in the scene. Toughguy bullshit is on the way out, and if it means pointing people out every time they heckle and they say bitch or anything like that we just need to turn the tables on them and make them feel as uncomfortable as all of our female allies have been made to feel uncomfortable themselves.
MRR: I’ve been able see you all play for the last three nights in a row, and two nights ago you played with 7 GENERATIONS from Orange County. Gather has a split 7” coming out with them soon. Can you tell me about your friendship with that group of young men, and how you came to know each other?
E: They are our best friends. They’ve been a huge inspiration to us being one of the only other vegan straightedge bands in California. They don’t hesitate or water down their lyrics or message. I like how in your face they are. In between songs they are always addressing the issues in their lyrics. They are definitely an amazing band. We are really excited to have a split with them. We are going to write a big zine that will come with it and try to bring back having literature at shows. Most of the things that I believe in today, I learned about through punk bands.
R: We want to push the political aspect of our music as hard as possible. It means so much to me because I got into hardcore hanging out with the kids from 7 GENERATIONS, and so it is incredible to be in a band that will be side by side with them bringing back what hardcore was in the nineties.
D: These were friends of ours before either 7 GENERATIONS or Gather were bands, and I think we both came to the realization that hardcore kids were thirsty for activism again, so both bands formed around the same time, and have just been yelling out at the top of our lungs the message that fueled us as 15 and 16 year olds. Lo and behold, 15 and 16 year olds now are reacting the same way we did. I don’t know if you have to go through a trough before you can go up to a swell again or not, but it’s just kind of disappointing that there was such as big void. The end of the nineties was kind of a slippery slope to fall into – emotional music about relationships and stuff – and it was appealing at first, but I’m just so grateful for a resurgence of political hardcore.
A: 7 GENERATIONS have been our friends for a long time, and we have played a lot of shows with them. One thing that is really unique about 7 GENERATIONS is that they are really true people. I think they are very true to the things that they sing about and talk about as a band, but beyond that, they are true to us as friends. I am really honored to be doing the split 7” with them.
MRR: You all just did a week west coast tour with Kurt from Catalyst Records on second guitar. How was tour Kurt?
K: It was a good time. It was a pleasure being on the road with a band that I think is awesome. Gather is one of my favorite bands out there. It was a great experience for me, definitely.
MRR: A lot of people go vegan for a variety of reasons. I recently learned that Eva went vegetarian after reading RUDIMENTARY PENI lyrics. What does veganism mean to each of you, and why did you each decide to adopt this lifestyle?
D: I was in a punk band called POLITICAL SUICIDE with my sister (Eva) and some friends in high school. The guitar player and my sister went vegetarian and I was like what the fuck is going on? I picked up a pamphlet that they had about testing on kittens for Proctor and Gamble products and it was atrocious. It showed a kitten’s head immobilized with bars going in the eyes and mouth and I was like “that is so fucked up.” I picked up a burger and I made the connection for the first time and I felt like a hypocrite. So I went vegetarian. I went vegan 2 years later with Eva.
E: At first I saw all the flyers at punk shows and I read lyrics to my favorite band, RUDIMENTARY PENI, and it kind of opened my eyes to how fucked up factory farms are and how horribly food animals are treated, and to me it was simply about the individual animal’s welfare. I just realized that as an animal lover all of my life, how could I continue to support these things? Later, the idea of anthropocentrism, and how fucked up it is that we as humans think that everything is at our disposal, and as long as it benefits humankind, it must be justified, kind of played into it all. And, as part of being an anarchist, and rejecting hierarchies, it only made sense to go vegan.
R: I had a lot of friends that were vegan and vegetarian and I listened to bands like CRASS and SUBHUMANS and ANTI-PRODUCT who talked about animal suffering. They were so passionate about it, and that made me question myself and my actions. I wanted to learn about the industries that I was supporting and continued to learn about the suffering of animals. I went vegetarian pretty quickly after informing myself of what was going on. I went vegan after deciding that the dairy industry isn’t any better than the flesh industry or leather or animal testing industries.
A: I went vegetarian when I was 15. I started getting into hardcore when I was probably about 14 or 15. I feel like at the time there was a lot more dialogue going on about animal rights. I remember going to shows and picking up pamphlets and flyers and I had a little collection of them that kinda just collected dust. I had a little pile in my room of literature and every once in a while I would glance through it. When I was 15 I was listening to a song called “Waste” by GOOD RIDDANCE, and that’s what made me decide to go vegetarian. I was getting into bands that had something to say about animal rights, like EARTH CRISIS and other bands. It wasn’t until 4 years later that I committed myself to going vegan. I think it was at this time that I realized that the meat industry and the dairy industry are essentially the same thing. They operate hand in hand. I could no longer ignore that.
MRR: What I am reading from you guys is that going vegan was more than just a diet change, or for the animals. It was sort of rethinking the way we consume all types of products. It was thinking about where things come from, and whether or not the creation of that product had a violent impact on animals or the earth and how capitalist consumer culture plays into that. What are some of your thoughts on consumer culture?
R: The ideal situation would be to eliminate capitalist consumption all together. To eliminate the possibility for corporations to survive in our society. And to stop supporting animal exploitation industries or corporations that openly exploit human labor such as Nike or Wal-Mart will cut it down. It can be taken further through dumpster diving which is a huge way to reduce your consumption which takes products out of the cycle of consumerism. I think those things are very important as well as direct attacks on corporations that continue to exploit.
D: Veganism and straightedge, for me, have both always been more than just the issue of not eating meat or not drinking beer for purity reasons. There has always been the aspect of anarchism in there. Not wanting to support industries that profit off of polluting people’s bodies, torturing sentient creatures, and raping the land at the same time. Those things by themselves have always been tools in reshaping the worldview that has been whispered to me since I was born. It’s still a process, and one good anecdote to illustrate that is that I was vegan for two years before I was really convinced of the individuality of each animal that is saved when you go vegan. I would just add up all of the figures about how bad it is for the topsoil and the atmosphere and how many gallons of water are used to produce meat versus grain. And so I was vegan for two years before I really internalized the very real individuality of every animal. Since then, veganism has been so much easier. I love veganism, and for me, the end result is reducing consumption and lightening my footstep.
R: Even things like wheat and modern agriculture at the scale that we have undertaken it is still exploitation of the earth, and as of now there is not a way to get a large amount of people the leave that system. Modern agriculture is based upon the idea that we should be able to use the earth in whatever way we want to. We are trying to fight against the idea that we can just take anything, and make it how we want it. There are other beings out there that have lives that should not be dictated by humans.
MRR: If someone is interested in what you guys have to say, what are some websites, books, magazines, or other resources that you would recommend checking out?
A: for those who are interested in veganism some good websites to check out are http://www.veganoutreach.org and http://www.goveg.com. at those sites you can learn all the reasons why a vegan lifestyle is better for animals, the environment, and your health. for further information on veganism and compassionate living i recommend reading A DIET FOR A NEW AMERICA by John Robbins, ANIMAL LIBERATION by Peter Singer, and FREE THE ANIMALS by Ingrid Newkirk. also i personally recommend DAYS OF WAR, NIGHTS OF LOVE (Crimethinc.), ISHMAEL by Daniel Quinn, and BLACK HAWK; an autobiography.
R: The rest of Daniel Quinn's work has been pretty influential to me as well. I would also suggest checking out No Compromise magazine, Bite Back (http://www.directaction.info), and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (http://www.SHACamerica.net) for info on people that are actually saving animals' lives. Green Anarchy is also a pretty good zine. For humyn political issues I like INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE by Ted Kaczyski, WE ARE EVERYWHERE: THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF GLOBAL ANTICAPITALISM, and most of what CrimethInc. has put out. The Plus Minus Records website also has an online version of the Hardcore/Punk Guide to Christianity that is pretty awesome.
E: Derrick Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe is an awesome book, Carrol Adam's The Sexual Politics of Meat, and right now I'm reading The Unnatural Order by Jim Mason, and that rules so far too.
SECOND INTERVIEW STRAIGHT FROM THE INSIDE ZINE
1) Take us through a few milestones of Gather's band history.
Dustin: Cool. Gather started in early 2004 after everyone in the band attended the Total Liberation Fest in Erie, PA. Allan and I were living together, and felt compelled to create the type of music we liked best. Genie, my sister, began singing and writing her awesome lyrics soon thereafter. Randy moved up to NorCal from SoCal and started playing bass. Gather was set on its line-up and we soon became like family.
We recorded our demo/e.p. with Scott from Earth Crisis, made a 'zine to accompany our self-released demo, and went out on the Total Liberation Tour in the summer of 2004. It was on that tour that we decided to work with Eric Vanguard and New Eden Records – he released the demo as our e.p., and went on to release our split 7" with Seven Generations. Our songs for the split were also recorded with Scott Crouse.
We were able, then, to do a west coast tour, play in Mexico City, Mexico, and start writing songs for the full length.
At this time, Allan went back to grad school to get his master's degree in education and a teaching credential. We decided that when he graduated, we'd release a full length and tour a lot.
So, we recorded our full length, Beyond the Ruins, with Vic DiCara of the band 108. We released it on xCatalystx Records, toured the US over the summer 2006 with Seven Generations and Kingdom, then toured Europe in winter of '06 with To Kill. Our last little tour was with xBishopx. We then played our infamous show at the Earth Crisis reunion, and played our amazing last shows before calling it quits.
I'd say that those are our biggest milestones.
2) What made you want to start playing music? Was it something you always wanted to do or was it just for shouting political lyrics and preaching vegan straight edge lifestyle?
We all started playing music years ago. We all played music before we were very political, but we all were involved in playing some form of 'punk'. We all happened to get political and into Veganism and Straight Edge, and even Anarchism before the band started. We decided to play the music in Gather because we wanted to capture the sound of some of our favorite bands from the 90's, like Chokehold, Another Victim, and Culture. We were also really influenced by current bands we were playing with, namely Purified in Blood, Make Move and Seven Generations.
We also decided that as of late 2003, early 2004, in California, there was a huge drought of political messages in hardcore. We wanted to espouse the message of, primarily, Animal Liberation, but soon came to realize that all liberation struggles are linked, and really sang about Total Liberation.
3) What was the main goals that Gather has achieved during these years? In terms of the hardcore scene what major changes have you seen, positive and negative?
When we started as a band, we didn't know many people from our local hardcore scene, or the VSXE scene at large. We were just huge hardcore fans, committed to the scene and the ethics. We made up some 'fantasy goals' that we never expected to achieve, such as: Put out a record, tour the US, play with Purification, sign to xCatalystx Records, and go to Europe. J Those are the goals we achieved that we never thought we would. Some of our goals that we never achieved were playing with xMaroonx, going to Japan, playing with Point of No Return, and touring South America.
The hardcore scene in the past few years has gotten better in some ways, in my opinion. There are a lot more political, VSXE kids now than there were seven or eight years ago. There are a lot of bigger bands who don't mind showing their pride in their convictions. So those things are cool. I don't even want to talk about any of the negative things that have come into being recently, we all know what they are: fashionable kids snaking their way into an underground scene and asshole jocks moshing to look cool rather than to have fun.
4) At the moment there is a lot of state violence and police opression towards green anarchist, radical ecologist and animal liberation activists in the United States. Can you tell us a bit more about that as I think a lot of people here in Eastern Europe know not so much about it. How does Gather take part in supporting SHAC7 and other Green Scare and AETA's victims? Only benefit shows, benefit CDs? What are some of the things you can do to support these political prisoners?
The US, in the past year, has really cracked down on environmental and animal rights groups. Most notably, the SHAC 7 were found guilty and sentenced to years in prison for being a part of an effective campaign against a corporation, Huntingdon Life Sciences. I urge any readers to check out http://www.shac7.com. There have also been FBI infiltrators and snitches involved in busting activists in California. The ALF and the ELF are considered the number one domestic "terrorist" threat in the US.
Gather has tried to educate people about the Green Scare through our lyrics and our speeches. We have donated a little bit of money, after breaking up, to political prisoners. We try to keep in touch with some prisoners through mail. Keeping in touch with prisoners, and supporting them, is the most important aspect of the struggle, because if those who have been caught are forgotten, then no one will persevere.
All of those things are ways that people can support prisoners: letters, donations, and support, ideologically. We must be willing to support radicals when it comes down to times of action – through allegiance and through direct assistance.
Finally, I've heard political prisoners say that the best thing someone can do to support them is by carrying out actions on their own! News will get to them in prison that the action was carried out! What better way to show your support ideologically than by covertly following in their footsteps?
5) What's your view on PETA and the mainstream activism? It seems that for some of the animal rights movement's actions, the goal is not really to make the most strategic or meaningful change for the animals, but that they are done to get the most media coverage. In case of prisoners support maybe it's good to get a mainstream media coverage.
I dunno, it's my opinion that mainstream activism is ineffectual and, for the most part, thrives on animal abuse industries existing (in order to receive donations and shit). This isn't to say that the people involved don't have compassion, but that their tactics are ineffectual.
This does not mean that I consider LEGAL tactics ineffectual, just 'mainstream' ones. There are lots of things that people can do that have very little or no risk that work well: home demos, live rescues, disrupting events, etc. Although it is easy to glamorize the 'big', illegal actions one can carry out I think there also needs to be a push for more people to be active regardless of how chic their actions are.
6) What do you do to uphold your beliefs in every day life outside of your band? What projects and collectives are you involved with?
None of us are involved in any collectives. Allan is teaching full time at an alternative school in California, I work full time and am involved in other bands, Eva and Randy both live without having jobs. In America, if you don't have a benefactor, it's very difficult to live without holding down a job, and so personal activism is a must for making that possible. That's all I really wanna go into here!
7) How can we close the gaps that exist between the different activist movements that hinder their individual growth?
I don't know that this is possible. The biggest push I've seen, in recent memory, to close the gaps between different activists groups was during the SHAC 7 trial. There was a big push to make people realize that even though the SHAC 7 were animal liberation activists, that the case infringed on free speech – in essence calling in liberal groups to support the SHAC 7 on the grounds of protecting free speech and limiting the govt.'s ability to arrest, detain, and sentence people who have committed no illegal crime. But in a post 9/11 AmeriKKKa, this is not an uncommon occurrence, especially for people of color.
I don't think that activism groups will ever combine into one big Total Liberation movement simply because the people that constitute most activist groups are single issue minded people. People who focus on their single issue blind themselves to the interconnectedness of all liberation struggles. People who DO recognize the interconnectedness of all liberation struggles tend to shift over to a sort of lifestyle activism or anarchism, in order to challenge the system as a whole. So in this way, the body of people who WOULD constitute the Total Lib activism movement actually shy away from the type of visible activism defined by single issue groups because they recognize the short-sightedness and tunnel-vision of single issue activist groups.
What's your opinion on primitivism, anti-technology and symbol culture rejection?
This path of thought is what most intrigues me, personally, and is one that I consider has the most relevancies as time goes on. 'Primitivism' and primitive skills are important, as they remind people that survival outside of cities and taker cultures depends on SKILLS, not necessarily money. Particularly paying close attention on how to live/survive in the absence of gasoline. None of us fully realize how dependent we are all on gasoline, and as gas continues to peak, and eventually disappears, will any of us know ways of surviving/thriving?
Symbol culture rejection, as you put it, is what I consider to be one of the best ways to maintain sanity in a world increasingly bombarded with mental pollution. Taking a little bit from Situationists and from current anthropologists and philosophers who recognize the origins of our abstraction dependent culture, one can begin to conceptualize a life free from dependence on TV, magazines, clocks, and hopefully, eventually, domestication.
As crazy as this all seems now, I think these skills will reveal themselves as valuable as time goes on: re-conceptualization of 'time', anti-domestication, survival skills, and small scale community units.
9) You're going to play your last shows with Earth Crisis on their reunion. What's your opinion on Earth Crisis and all the controversials they've got?
We did not play our last shows with Earth Crisis. We were asked to play their one California reunion show, which we were initially very excited to play. We learned a lot from Earth Crisis when getting into hardcore, and recorded our e.p. and split 7" with Scott Crouse, their guitar player.
We were all a little bit oblivious to the controversy surrounding Earth Crisis because we're about 5 years too young, although we now have an understanding of some of these controversies and the relevancy they had in the context of the 90's hardcore scene. I'd say that my opinion now is that I probably would have liked them less if I were the person I am now, ten years ago. But growing up in a small town where all I was going off of was their lyric sheet and song explanations, I consider them valuable to my life and the scene I am involved in.
10) How do you see the homophobia and other kind of discriminations occurring in the US hardcore scene? What's your opinion about the homophobe and crooked sexual hardline stances of Vegan Reich followers back in the day and their reflections now?
Those who spend time rationalizing and publicly defending the insane idea that homosexuality is either unnatural or 'wrong' are fucking pathetic. We do not consider these homophobes to be a part of any scene worth mentioning, and are certainly not involved in ours. Hardline is dead and anyone who claims to be maintaining the movement is fetishizing the past, is ignorant to how people live outside of their bullshit moral constructions, and will fade away in due time because there is no scene to support them. I hate the few people I know of now who still regurgitate the old hardline rhetoric on message boards.
11) You have a deal against the organized religion and the Church of Christ. But what about Islam and other states of mind and religious connected cults within the vegan straight edge movement?
Any band or hardcore kid who tries to preach a lifestyle of compliance to a religious moral order should stay the fuck out of hardcore and go waste their life away in their own church.
12) Do you think the recent attacks by the USA and its supporters on Islamic countries will escalate into something far worse?
Of course. The acts of 'terrorism' carried out by AmeriKKKa on other countries on behalf of economic gains and at the behest of lobby groups supporting Israel will definitely result in retaliation by those affected. The term is 'blowback' – when we carry out acts of terror and large scale murder, those political decisions tend to 'blowback' in our face.
13) What about the Palestinian occupation by Israel?
We recognize that this is a very complicated issue, and that even the most educated experts on this issue are divided on their opinions. I, however, have nothing but disdain for Israel and their policies of murder. I hate them on so many levels. I hate Israel because they use missiles to murder Palestinians, but call the Palestinians who use suicide bombs terrorists because they can't afford the same weapons to retaliate with. I hate Israel for pressuring the USA into starting their wars and supporting them on their conquests, while at the same time scoffing in the face of Amerikkka by building walls and furthering conquest, even against the wishes of the U$ govt. I hate conservative Amerikkkans who support Israel on the grounds that possession of Palestinian land is necessary for the biblical end times to commence. The cultural genocide happening in Palestine as a result is as devastating as the loss of life and land. Fuck the U$A and fuck Israhell for their crimes against people and the earth.
14) There are some extreme right wing vegan straidght edge bands and people in Europe. The straight edge lifestyle and that radical hardcore scene ideals has yet to be exposed in a way from within the neo-nazi community. There are active national socialists who take a part in the animal rights and eco-defence movement. If the animal/earth liberation is the objective What about Nazis who have the same views as you? Would you work alongside people like these if they were holding a demos and direct action against vivisection, meat industry, fur farms?
Of course not. Those people are so full of contradictions and are not fighting for freedom and equality. Gather has always been an anarchist band striving for autonomy and equality. The meat industry needs to fall by any means necessary, but for no reason should we have to stand united with people that we would normally call enemies.
15) What do you know about Bulgaria?
Before looking at Wikipedia? Nothing! L But after looking at Wikipedia let me say welcome to the EU! haha
16) Band members projects after the split?
I am involved in three new projects right now. They are still in the very beginning stages. If anybody is interested, add Gather on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/gather and keep your eyes peeled for bulletins about future bands. Nobody else is really working with any other projects, although Allan is writing music for a project that he hopes to get going soon. His goal is to, 'write the next Firestorm.' Allan is currently working on the third issue of his 'zine What We Have! Wish him luck!
17) Your final words..
Thank you for your patience in getting this interview back late. Thank you for your interest and support! If anybody has any questions, feel free to contact me at ibdrugfree@gmail.com! Thank you!
-Dustin Hall, drummer of Gather
THIRD INTERVIEW
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