from "Beyond Civilization"
by Daniel Quinn
We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.
Marshall Sahlins
Because revolution in our culture has always represented an attack on hierarchy, it has always meant upheaval–literally a heaving up from below. But upheaval has no role to play in moving beyond civilization. If the plane is in trouble, you don't shoot the pilot, you grab a parachute and jump. To overthrow the hierarchy is pointless; we just want to leave it behind.
As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. This is in part because it can imagine revolution, but it can't imagine abandonment. But even if it could imagine abandonment, it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support.
It's almost impossible to prevent people from doing nothing (which is what discontinuing support amounts to).
But won't the powers that be try to prevent people from doing nothing? I can imagine them trying (but I honestly need help imagining them succeeding).
The object of ordinary revolution is to effect global change across the board with a single, sweeping blow. Ideally, former rulers must disappear overnight–en masse, along with all supporters and minions–with a complete cast of successors ready to step into their shoes the following morning to proclaim the new regime. Scenarios like this one are meaningless to those who would move beyond civilization.
In the first place, there's no need for global change. Those who insist on having nothing less than global change will wait a long time, probably forever. There's no need for everyone in the world to go to bed one night living one way and wake up the next morning living another way. This isn't going to happen, and it's pointless to try to make it happen.
There is likewise no need for change across the board–for everything to suddenly begin to be done differently. It's unnecessary for this to happen, and nothing in the world can make it happen. Always keep in mind that there is no one right way for people to live. There never has been and never will be.
Finally, we don't want the ruling class to disappear overnight. We're not ready to see the infrastructure of civilization disappear (and may never be). At least for the time being, we want our rulers and leaders to continue to supervise civilization's drudgery for us–keeping the potholes filled, the sewage and water treatment plants running, and so on.
People often imagine that it would be wonderful if all six billion of us started living a new way tomorrow.
It's one of our most deep-rooted and misguided memes, that there absolutely must be some one right way for everyone to live.
I admire the Gebusi of New Guinea, but (trust me) not everyone in the world should live the way they do. I admire the Gypsies, but not everyone in the world should live the way they do–and (oddly enough) if they did, their way of life would fail. I admire the Jalali–nomadic peddlers and performers of Afghanistan–but not everyone in the world should live the way they do. I admire the Tuposa of the Sudan, the Rendille of Kenya, and the Kariera of Western Australia, but not everyone in the world should live the way they do. This isn't sociological thinking, this is ecological thinking. Macaws have a good life, but their habitats would fail if all birds lived like macaws. Giraffes have a good life, but their habitats would fail if all mammals lived like giraffes. Beavers have a good life, but their habitats would fail if all rodents lived like beavers.
Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.
We don't need to have all six billion of us living like environmental saints tomorrow–or ever, for that matter. To take such a thing as our objective would merely assure failure. This is precisely the strength of the strategy I'm proposing here. We don't need to achieve the impossible dreams of global enlightenment, unity, and resolve that people like Mikhail Gorbachev and Al Gore describe as humanity's only hope. We simply can't, as Gorbachev suggests, wait for "all members of the world community" to "resolutely discard old stereotypes." We can't wait for all members of the world community to do anything, because if we know anything at all, we know that all members of the world community will never, ever do anything as a body. "The time has come," Gorbachev says, "to choose a new direction of global development." But who's going to do this choosing? Everyone? And how many decades (or even centuries) will have to pass before that happens? Where on earth is Al Gore's "New Common Purpose" to come from? When have the people of earth ever been able to agree on a common anything? These are will-o-the-wisps, vain expectations that keep us rooted in hopelessness, year after year, decade after decade.
We can't wait for our national leaders to save us. When all we demand from them (or even tolerate from them) are instant, short-term gains, why would they suddenly begin thinking like global visionaries?
Because we don't expect to overthrow governments, abolish world capitalism, make civilization vanish, or turn everyone in the world into walking buddhas, we don't have to wait for anything. But I have to warn you that many people will tell you the opposite, that we have to wait until we have a world that is already perfect. They feel absolutely nothing should happen until we've banished social inequality, racism, sexism, poverty, and every other bad thing you can think of.
I've had people tell me we have to wait till everyone "respects" everyone else. I've had people tell me we can't do anything till everyone's "consciousness" has been raised. People who think like this would wait for the cut to heal before applying a bandage, would wait till daybreak to light a candle, would wait for the sinking ship to rise before getting in the lifeboat. They're way past my comprehension, and beyond offering the opinion that they're going to have an awful long wait, I can't think of a thing to say to them.
A friend recently sent me a copy ofDeep Democracy, a periodical published by the Alliance for Democracy whose mission is "to free all people from corporate domination of politics, economics, the environment, culture, and information; to establish true democracy; and to create a just society with a sustainable equitable economy." The cover featured an illustration in political-cartoon style of the organization's self-perception: a diminutive David facing a Goliath armed with the sword of money politics and the spear of greed, wearing the armor of multinational corporations, and shielded by a mainstream media monopoly. The title of the cartoon couldn't have been more apt: "Déjà Vu (All Over Again)." Indeed. Over and over and over and over.
I had to explain to my friend that, while I wish the Alliance the best of luck, I don't perceive myself to be a participant in this struggle. We can't afford to wait for David to finish off Goliath, because obviously David never finishes off Goliath. The two of them have been standing there toe to toe for thousands of years–and they'll still be standing there a thousand years from now.
We don't need to defeat Goliath. We need to change the way he thinks.
Once upon a time in the commercial carpeting industry there was a Goliath named Ray C. Anderson who had taken his company, Interface, Inc., from a modest beginning to a position of global leadership in about twenty years, becoming one of those wicked billionaire multinational corporations you hear about.
This Goliath had always made a point of being in compliance with government regulations, but these didn't stop the business from being a highly pollutive one–petroleum based and contributing heavily to landfill.
But in 1994 he read two books that changed his mind about what he was doing. One was Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce, the other wasIshmael. After reading these books, Ray Anderson saw that being in compliance is not nearly enough. He immediately initiated action to end his dependence on petroleum and to begin making one hundred percent recyclable carpeting made from one hundred percent recycled materials, thus reducing his company's contribution to landfill to zero. It's important to note that these changes didn't affect just his corporation. Suddenly all his competitors were compelled to adopt his standards in order to remain competitive. This Goliath didn't just reform a business, he reformed an entire industry–not because any plucky little David defeated him, but because two books made him think a different way about the world and his place in it.
If people will willingly reform an industry when their minds are changed, why spend billions to enact and enforce laws to compel them to do it?
I say again that because we don't expect to overthrow governments, abolish world capitalism, make civilization vanish, turn everyone in the world into walking buddhas, or cure all social and economic ills, we don't have to wait for anything. If ten people walk beyond civilization and build a new sort of life for themselves, then those ten are already living in the next paradigm, from the first day. They don't need the support of an organization. They don't need to belong to a party or a movement. They don't need new laws to be passed. They don't need permits. They don't need a constitution. They don't need tax-exempt status.
For those ten, the revolution will already have succeeded.
They probably should be prepared, however, for the outrage of their neighbors.
The tribes we grew up with during the first three or four million years of human life were ethnic groups, extended families having a common language, common laws and customs, and so on. Their social borders were generally (but not absolutely) closed to members of other tribes. Captives of war were an obvious exception, but a member of the Sioux, for example, couldn't ordinarily just decide to become a Navajo. It might happen under extraordinary circumstances, to be sure, but tribal integrity would have suffered if it became a general rule.
Rennie and I have links to the Quinn clan and to the MacKay clan (hers), but like most modern clan members, we go our way and they go theirs. Very occasionally what might be considered a tribal action will take place in these clans, but in the modern world no one is surprised when people turn out to be closer to friends and colleagues than to families.
But there's nothing specially sacrosanct about ethnic tribalism. The sort of tribalism we see at work in the circus evolved in the same way as ethnic tribalism. It too is the product of natural selection, works as well (in its own way) as ethnic tribalism, and provides us with a model that is perfectly adapted to the urban circumstances most of us find ourselves in.
In My Ishmael I recounted the life of a young man named Jeffrey, loosely based on Paul Eppinger, whose journal was published by his father under the titleRestless Mind Quiet Thoughts. Jeffrey was attractive, intelligent, personable, and multitalented, but he couldn't find anything he wanted to do, other than hang out with friends, write in his journal, and play the guitar. His friends were forever urging him to find a direction, get some ambition, and care about something, but of course none of these things can be done at will. He came to believe his friends when they told him he was unusual–peculiar, even–in his aimlessness. In the end, despairing of finding the purposefulness that seems to come so easily to others, he quietly and without fuss took his own life.
I wasn't surprised to hear from many youngsters who feel exactly like Jeffrey, who know the world is full of things they should want to do–and who imagine that there must be something dreadfully wrong with them for failing to want it. Because I've taken the trouble to study cultures different from our own, I know there's nothing innately human about wanting to "make something" of yourself or to "get ahead" or to have a career, a profession, or a vocation. Notions like these are foreign to most aboriginal peoples, who seem perfectly content to live just the way Jeffrey wanted to live–and why shouldn't they be?
Jeffrey died for lack of a tribe–but not, of course, for lack of an ethnic tribe. Youngsters often tell me they long to run off to join the Yanomami of Brazil or the Alawa of Australia, and I have to explain that tribes like these aren't open to them. Though famously hospitable, they can't afford to take in wide-eyed kids who show up on their doorsteps completely devoid of the skills needed to help the tribe survive.
Throughout his wanderings, Jeffrey stayed with people who were making a living of one kind or another–family friends, ex-college chums, their parents, and so on. But, not surprisingly, none of them were making a living tribally; they had jobs, professions, and careers, but these were held individually, so there was no room for Jeffrey in them. They weren't making a living as a collaborative effort, so there was no way to extend their living to him. He was forever a guest, and guests (however charming) inevitably wear out their welcome.
In a sense, Jeffrey was unable to find anyone who knew how to give him as little as he wanted. Many youngsters want as little, and if they'll work together tribally, they can get it quite easily. Every tribe has the standard of living its members are willing to support.
People like Jeffrey need to live in a world of tribes, and a world of open tribes. And they aren't alone in this. Far from it, I think.
The circus is the very model of an open tribe. Things like nationality, language, race, ethnic background, age, gender, sexual orientation, political opinions, and religious beliefs won't exclude anyone who can contribute to the living of the circus, but its openness isn't absolute, of course. It isn't a refuge for the homeless, for example; it doesn't take in people altruistically. This isn't to say that there's a prohibition against altruism. The circus must take good care of its members or they'll defect to circuses that are more open-handed and bountiful. It's a question of survival. A species that can't hold onto its members becomes extinct, and the same is true of a tribe.
On the other hand, a circus that is too altruistic (for example, that takes in people who don't contribute to its success) soon has difficulty making ends meet; it begins cutting salaries, lowering the general living standard, skimping on quality across the board–and begins to lose its most talented members to other circuses.
Circuses that find a workable balance between economic success and community needs stay in business.
Circuses that don't find that balance disappear.
Ordinary businesses don't burden themselves with tribal obligations. Most obviously, they don't "take care" of their workers; to do so would introduce them to a whole suite of problems in which there's no profit whatever. Instead, they pay salaries and expect workers to take care of themselves. One worker may thrive on a given salary, while another languishes on it. From the company's point of view, there's no injustice in this if the salary is fair in the first place. It's not the company's fault that the second worker has a large family to support or an ailing parent to take care of–or is just a bad manager of money. The company can afford to be hard-nosed about this; it doesn't risk losing this second worker to a competitor, because its competitors are equally hard-nosed about it.
This unspoken agreement among businesses to limit their obligation to issuing a paycheck is precisely what gives our society its prison ambience. Workers have "no way out." Whether they move from company to company or from nation to nation, their employers' obligation ends with the paycheck (an arrangement that obviously suits employers very well). Prisons are always arranged to suit the warders.
That's the anticipated order of things. No one thinks that prisons are built to suit the needs of prisoners or that businesses are built to suit the needs of workers.
Stepping into a tribe means stepping out of the prison.
Having read this far, a student said to me, "I love what you're saying, but I don't see how just walking away from civilization helps us live `as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes,' which is the benchmark for success you established in Ishmael." I think that, like many people, this person is more at ease with the idea of giving up things than getting things. He worries that people enjoying themselves may not be living as blamelessly as people denying themselves. Well-intentioned people often want to feel they're giving up something, which is only to be expected in a culture where all ethical and religious systems commend self-denial. In hierarchical societies it's always a good idea to make poverty sound like a blessing (and the rich are always especially vain about their austerities).
If you think this is something that no longer holds true, try this. Find me a single elementary or secondary textbook that promotes being rich as a value. Being rich is never held up to schoolchildren as an ideal.
Look all you want, you won't find a single text that says: "Make lots of money so you can have the best of everything–exotic cars, luxurious mansions, yachts, servants, designer clothes, extravagant jewelry, endless first-class travel, and so on." Our official classroom mythology is as prissy about wealth as it is about sex.
People have lived many different ways on this planet, but about ten thousand years ago there appeared one people who believed everyone in the world should live a single way–their way, which they considered the only "right" way. After ten thousand years of hard work, this one people, whom I've called the Takers, had conquered every continent on the planet and dominated the world completely. In the course of their conquest, the Takers overran, swallowed up, displaced, or eliminated every other culture and civilization in their path. Once the civilizations of the New World were destroyed, there was only one civilization left in the entire world–that of the Takers: ours. From that point on,civilization was synonymous with our civilization.
At the present time, the United States represents the high point of maximum affluence that our civilization has reached. There's no place on earth where people have more, use more, or waste more than the United States. Though other nations haven't as yet reached this high point, they yearn to reach it. They have no other goal. There's only one right way for people to live, and the people of the United States epitomize it. Everyone in the world should have a house, a car, a computer, a television set, a telephone, and so on–at least one of each, preferably several.
This I call "the culture of maximum harm," a culture in which all members are dedicated to attaining the high point of maximum affluence (and to forever raising the high point of maximum affluence).
I've been asked, "If we don't crush the Taker way entirely, won't it rebound and begin expanding again?"
The Middle Ages could only remain the Age of Faith for as long as Christian mythology dominated people's minds, all the way from serfs to kings. After that mythology was abased and superseded during the Renaissance, it was inconceivable that such an Age of Faith could recur. Never again will a whole civilization embrace the vision that dominated the Middle Ages.
The same is true of Taker mythology. Once it has been exposed for what it is–a collection of poisonous delusions–it will no longer be capable of exercising the power it has exercised over us for the past ten thousand years. Who, knowing that there's no one right way for people to live, will take up the sword to spread the Taker vision? Who, knowing that civilization is not humanity's last invention, will defend the hierarchy as if it were humanity's most sacred institution?
But won't the last pharaohs in their maddened wrath turn their nuclear arsenal on us? Perhaps they would if they could, but where are they going to find us except living right beside them in their own cities? Is the president, seeing his/her power slip away, going to bomb Washington D.C. to destroy the tribal people living there? Is the governor of New York going to bomb Manhattan?
Because all six billion members of the culture of maximum harm are striving to maximize their affluence, we shouldn't be alarmed solely by the one percent who live like lords of the universe. We must be equally alarmed by the other ninety-nine percent who are hoping to live like lords of the universe. It's probably not going to be the billionaire pop stars, sports heroes, and deal-makers who are going to lead us out of the prison we share with them. It's the rest of us who must find the way out, who must discover something better to hope for than inhabiting a sable-lined cell next to Barbra Streisand, Michael Jordan, or Donald Trump.
The world can support a few million pharaohs, but it can't support six billion pharaohs.
"Something better to hope for …" Is this by any chance a reference to what I called "another story to be in" inIshmael? Is this what I meant when I said that "people need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them"? Is this what I meant when I said inThe Story of B that "If the world is saved, it will be saved because the people living in it have a new vision"? Of course it is.
In case it isn't evident, I'm still working on my student's question: "How does walking away from civilization help us live as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes?" Any move beyond civilization represents a move away from the culture of maximum harm and therefore reduces your harmfulness. Jumping over the wall of the prison won't instantly make you as harmless as a shark, tarantula, or rattlesnake, but it will instantly move you in that direction.
Look at it this way: no move beyond civilization will ever result in greater harm. If you want to do harm, you've got to stick to civilization. It's only inside that framework that you can burn up ten thousand gallons of jet fuel just to have lunch at your favorite restaurant in Paris. It's only inside that framework that you can casually dynamite a coral reef just because it inconveniences you.
Moving beyond civilization automatically limits your access to the tools needed to do harm. The people of the Circus Flora will never build a Stealth bomber or open a steel mill–not just because they wouldn't want to but because even if they wanted to, they wouldn't have access to the tools. To regain access to the tools, they'd have to leave the circus and find new places for themselves in the culture of maximum harm.
Though it's a good and necessary start, being less harmful is not enough. We're in the midst of a food race that is more deadly to us and to the world around us than the Cold War arms race was. This is a race between food production and population growth. Present-day followers of English economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), like those of the past, view producing enough food to feed our population as a "win," just as American Cold Warriors saw producing enough weapons to destroy the Soviet Union as a "win." They fail to see that, just as every American "win" stimulated an answering Soviet "win," every win in food production stimulates an answering "win" in population growth.
Right now our food race is rapidly converting our planet's biomass into human mass. This is what happens when we clear a piece of land of wildlife and replant it with human crops. This land was supporting a biomass comprising hundreds of thousands of species and tens of millions of individuals.
Now all the productivity of that land is being turned into human mass, literally into human flesh. Every day all over the world diversity is disappearing as more and more of our planet's biomass is being turned into human mass. This is what the food race is about. This is exactly what the food race is about: every year turning more of our planet's biomass into human mass.
The arms race could only be ended in two ways, either by a nuclear catastrophe or by the participants walking away from it. Luckily the second of these happened. The Soviets called it quits–and there was no catastrophe.
The race between food and population is the same. It can be ended by catastrophe, when simply too much of our planet's biomass is tied up in humans, and fundamental ecological systems collapse, but it doesn't have to end that way. It can end the way the arms race ended, by people simply walking away from it. We can say, "We understand now that there can be no final triumph of food over population.
This is because every single win made on the side of food is answered by a win on the side of population.
It has to be that way, it always has been that way, and we can see that it's never going to stop being that way."
But this isn't going to happen because of these few words–or even the thousands I've devoted to it in my other books and speeches. This subject engages our cultural mythology at the most profound level–a level far deeper than I imagined when I thought it could be handled in a few pages inIshmael.
This is the deadly man-eating Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth of our culture … far beyond the scope of the present expedition.
People will still be living here in one hundred years–if we start living a new way, soon.
Otherwise, not.
But how would we get there, and what would it look like? Utopians can't let go of the idea of sweeter, gentler, more loving people taking over. I prefer to look at what worked for millions of years for people as they are . Sainthood was not required.
To project into the future: as people begin going over the wall in the early decades of the new millennium, our societal guardians are at first alarmed, seeing it as portending the end of civilization-as-we-know-it. They try heightening the wall with social and economic barbed wire but soon realize the futility of this. People will keep dragging stones if they're convinced there's no other way to go, but once another way opens up, nothing can stop them from defecting. Initially the defectors derive their living from the pyramid-builders, just as circuses do today. As time goes on, however, they begin to be less dependent on the pyramid-builders. They interact more and more with each other, building their own intertribal economy.
After a hundred years civilization is still hanging on at about half its present size. Half the world's population still belongs to the culture of maximum harm, but the other half, living tribally, enjoys a more modest lifestyle, directed toward getting more of what people want (as opposed to just getting more).
Gradually the economic balance of power shifts between "civilization" (by now almost always burdened with those quote marks) and the surrounding "beyond civilization." More and more people are seeing that they can trade off a plenitude of things they don't deeply want (power, social status, and supposed conveniences, amenities, and luxuries) for things they really do deeply want (security, meaningful work, more leisure, and social equality–all products of the tribal way of life). "The economy," no longer tied to an ever-expanding market, has become an increasingly local affair as global and national corporations gradually lose their reason for being.
Two hundred years out, the thing we call civilization has been left behind and seems as quaintly obsolete as Oliver Cromwell's theocracy. The cities are still there–where would they go?--as are the arts, the sciences, and technology, but these are no longer instruments and embodiments of the culture of maximum harm.
I don't indulge in these speculations in order to lay claim to powers of prophecy. I toss them into the water to show you what part of the pond I'm aiming at … and to let you follow the ripples back to the shore of the present.
In the paradigmatic utopian scenario, you gather your friends, equip yourselves with agricultural tools, and find a bit of wilderness paradise to which you can escape and get away from it all. The apparent attraction of this weary old fantasy is that it requires no imagination (being ready-made), can be enacted by almost anyone with the requisite funds, and sometimes actually works for longer than a few months.
To advocate it as a general solution for six billion people would set an all-time record for inanity.
Civilization isn't a geographical territory, it's a social and economic territory where pharaohs reign and pyramids are built by the masses. Similarly, beyond civilization isn't a geographical territory, it's a social and economic territory where people in open tribes pursue goals that may or may not be recognizably "civilized." You don't have to "go somewhere" to get beyond civilization. You have to make your living a different way.