Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure

by Daniel Quinn

  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?

  Something better to hope for

  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” in Ishmael? 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 in The 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.

  An intermediate goal: less harmful

  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.

  But is “less harmful” enough?

  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.

  Ending the food race

  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 in Ishmael. This is the deadly man-eating Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth of our culture … far beyond the scope of the present expedition.

  100 years beyond civilization

  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).

  200 years beyond civilization

  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.

  But where exactly is “beyond”?

  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 alltime 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.

  PART FIVE

  The Tribe of Crow

  Yeah,

  Well,

  It's pretty lonely

  at the bottom,

  too.

  JOSEPH CHASSLER

  Reluctant pioneers

  By conservative estimates, at any one time there are about half a million people in the United States who have been thrust beyond civilization into a social and economic limbo that nowadays is identified as homelessness. Homelessness is slightly more than a euphemism for poverty, since it draws attention to the special form poverty takes in hypermodern cities, which might be defined as cities in which space is so valuable that none of it can be spared for the poor. With the complete disappearance of low-cost housing, there's just no room “indoors” for the poor in such cities.

  Several distinct streams come together in the homeless flood. One consists of the mentally ill, turned out into the streets when deinstitutionalization became the rage in the 1970s. Another consists of semior unskilled workers whose jobs have been exported to countries where labor is cheaper or made superfluous by downsizing or automation. Another consists of those who in the fifties and sixties would have been called the “disadvantaged”—abandoned women and children, victims of racial or ethnic prejudice, undereducated, unskilled, and chronically unemployed. All these are perceived as victims or as the “deserving” poor. Others in the homeless flood are runaways, drug addicts, bums, winos, transients, and vagabonds, who, because they apparently “choose” to be homeless, are the “undeserving” poor.

  Making the homeless disappear

  Public officials (reflecting the unspoken desires of their constituents) naturally want the homeless to disappear. This isn't an unkind impulse. The assumption is that the homeless really want to disappear (at least the “deserving poor” among them)— by getting jobs, finding homes, and resuming a “normal” life. The role of officialdom is therefore to assist, prompt, and encourage the homeless to get about the business of resuming that normal life. Above all, nothing must be done that would encourage the homeless to remain homeless. In short, homelessness must be made as unremittingly difficult, degrading, and painful as possible, and you may be sure that our public guardians know well how to accomplish this.

  Naturally the public wants homeless shelters, but these are hardly expected to be hospitable; no one should want to “stay” in one. If the homeless began to “stay” in shelters, this would defeat the purpose, which is to entice them out of homelessness. Avoiding officially sanctioned shelters at all costs, the homeless take refuge almost anywhere else—in alleys, parks, tunnels, and abandoned buildings, under bridges, and so on. The police have to roust them from these areas regularly, because if the homeless become comfortable anywhere, what motive have they to stop being homeless? Making and keeping the homeless as miserable as possible is cherished as a sort of tough love—the very best and kindest thing we can do for them.

  The only trouble is, for some strange reason, it doesn't work worth a damn.

  If it didn't work last year …

  The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE).

  Every year we pass more laws, hire more police, build more prisons, and sentence more offenders for longer periods—all without moving one inch closer to “ending” crime. It didn't work last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we'll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won't work this year either.

  Every year we spend more money on our schools, hoping to “fix” whatever's wrong with them, and every year the schools remain stubbornly unfixed. Spending money didn't work last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we'll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won't work this year either.

  Every year we try to make the homeless go away, and every year the homeless remain with us. We couldn't shoehorn them back into “the mainstream” last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we'll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won't work this year either.

  A new rule for new minds

  To figure out a better response to failure than this, you don't (as they say) have to be a rocket scientist. I'd formulate it this way: If it didn't work last year or the year before that or the year before that—or any year in recorded history—then TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

  We deeply believe in taking a military approach to problems. We proclaim a “war” on poverty. When that fails, we proclaim a “war” on drugs. We “fight” crime. We “combat” homelessness. We “battle” hunger. We vow to “defeat” AIDS.

  Engineers can't afford to fail as consistently as politicians and bureaucrats, so they prefer accedence to resistance (as I do). For example, they know that no structure can be made rigid enough to resist an earthquake. So, rather than defy the earthquake's power by building rigid structures, they accede to it by building flexible ones. To accede is not merely to give in but rather to give in while drawing near; one may accede not only to an argument but to a throne. Thus the earthquakeproof building survives not by defeating the earthquake's power but by acknowledging it—by drawing it in and dealing with it.

  As soon as someone is brave enough to deal with homelessness this way, by acknowledging it and drawing it in instead of fighting it, remarkable things will begin to happen in that place—and not just for the homeless.

  Listening to the homeless

  One element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the poor will consistently choose the least worst alternative available to them. If you find them living under a bridge instead of in a nice, clean municipal shelter just a block away, you can be absolutely sure they haven't made a mistake—from their point of view. The shelter's admittance procedures may be intolerably invasive, arbitrary, or humiliating, or its rules may be Draconian. Whatever, the discomforts of sheltering under the bridge are more endurable. Naturally what's least worst to one individual isn't necessarily the least worst to another. Street people in New York City will tell you there's so much food around it's almost impossible to starve. Even so, there are some who would rather shun that world of abundance and stay deep underground, where fresh game is plentiful (once you get used to the idea of hunting, killing, and cooking “track rabbits”—rats).

  Another element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the homeless understand their situation, not necessarily the way a social scientist, economist, or urban planner would but from a practical a
nd personal point of view. They may not be able to discourse on the process of deindustrialization, but they know that people who smugly order them to “get a job” are living in never-never land and imagining a world of work that hasn't existed in decades.

  Is homelessness an earthquake?

  Acastaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, “Get a boat!”

  Social Scientist Peter Marcuse has written: “Homelessness inspires not only the intellectual realization that the machinery of the system has failed somehow to produce basic shelter everyone needs, but even more the social realization that the system has come up against some limits it cannot exceed, has created a world it can no longer control.” (Emphasis added.)

  I like this quote because its reference to “the machinery of the system” fits my engineering analogy so neatly. This machinery has created a world inhabited by people it can no longer control. To translate this into my own metaphorical system, Marcuse is saying the homeless have been pushed into a social and economic no man's land that is beyond civilization. And when that machinery exerts itself to force the homeless back where they belong, it fails—repeatedly and consistently.

  Technology guru Jacques Attali has announced the end of the era of the working class. “Machines are the new proletariat,” he says. “The working class is being given its walking papers.” But we all know there's no room for nonworkers within the structure known as civilization. So where on earth are their walking papers supposed to take them—except beyond that structure?