The Noise Machine

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“Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine—that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise.”  -Max Picard, The World of Silence, p. 40

The refrigerator hums and I sometimes don’t even notice it until it stops. But when it stops, I always take notice. There is a feeling of relief even when I may not have been consciously aware of being bothered.

Similarly, traffic has been found to interfere with people’s sleep even when they do not report being disturbed. They may report getting used to the ever present volume, even failing to notice it altogether, but their animal bodies are not used to it. At the physiological level there remains a measurable disturbance—evidence that the city remains an alien and hostile environment.

NYC_Subway_R160A_9237_on_the_EIn 2006, The Journal of Urban Health reported that regular use of the subway system in New York City is sufficient to result in noise induced hearing loss; standing on the platforms or riding in the train cars exposes riders to unsafe, potentially injurious, levels of noise. The average weekday sees over five million rides on the NYC subway system; it is a routine part of the day for most riders and so it is not surprising that the risk is generally overlooked. Researchers point out that “avoidance may be an option for some riders, but for most urban dwellers and commuters, this is probably not practical.”

It is not practical to avoid a means of transit that is likely to result in hearing loss. A refusal to sacrifice one’s hearing thus disqualifies a person from full participation in society possibly even employment and with it the means to feed and shelter oneself. To participate—and one is not readily allowed to opt out—in modern society requires that one not merely accept risk but readily submit to being harmed in very serious ways. The person who doesn’t ride the subway because of the noise is clearly an eccentric and possibly seen as dysfunctional (a most interesting word!).

But hearing loss isn’t merely inconvenience and it is not a stand alone problem. The website for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) explains that “[e]ven a small amount of hearing loss can have profound, negative effects on speech, language comprehension, communication, classroom learning, and social development.” Furthermore, noise induced hearing loss has been linked with impaired mental health, memory loss, disturbed sleep pattens, impaired communication skills, and even cardiovascular disease. This is what accompanies mass transit.

Mass transit represents a foreseeable and significant harm but not, strictly speaking, a deliberate harm. That is to say that the purpose of mass transit is not to deafen or otherwise injure riders. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that the irritating and the pain-inducing features of noise have been made use of in deliberate ways. For example, public places and private businesses that want to deter the presence of teenagers have installed devices which produce a high frequency noise that is said to bLRAD fergusone extremely unpleasant to teenagers but inaudible to adults. A more extreme example is the LRAD (long range acoustic device), a sonic weapon that is euphemistically described as “non-lethal”. The LRAD can direct a beam of sound at a volume well past the point of causing injury and pain; it has been used to disperse or immobilize protesters and thereby quell dissent such as last year in Ferguson, Missouri.

Beyond Injury

But the problem with the noise of civilization is not limited to physical injury. Even if the hearing apparatus we have evolved were able to endure the volume of civilization, the noise itself would block out what is of considerable value thereby severing a vital link to the wider world. I try to listen to the voices of birds while walking through town but they are frequently drowned out by the noise of cars. I try to hear the water that travels along the bike path but its quieter sounds are very often blotted out. Only the loudest voices reach my ear, the quieter ones are effectively eliminated from the soundscape.

It’s important to remember David Abram’s assertion that “we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human”. If we are cut off from the voices of birds and rushing water, we experience a profound loss. The noise machine of civilization blunts our senses and shrinks our world. It is the aural equivalent of wearing blinders.

Gordon Hempton, author of One Square Inch of Silence, has suggested that “the rate of quiet places extinction vastly exceeds the rate of species extinction”. The number of places where quiet can be experienced is shrinking. While once almost a birthright, more common than a subway ride or air travel, the experience of quiet is actually becoming quite rare. Lacking the experience it’s unclear how many will be aware of what is being stolen from them.

Just as there is no easy way to opt out of noise-induced injury, there are almost no quiet places where one might escape or even visit. The noise is totalizing.

False Silence

More often than not noise is a by-product and, worse yet, may signal an inefficiency in the system. On the surface, this seems to provide a motivation within the framework of civilization to turn down the volume. But the silence of civilization is something altogether different.

A quieter subway system is not a tenable solution. Gordon Hempton’s goal of re-routing commercial jets so they don’t fly over national parks is admirable but woefully insufficient. Ear plugs, noise damping materials, new technologies, and new legislation will not be sufficient to quiet the noise machine of civilization or to create a meaningful silence.

The only silence that can be achieved within the framework of civilization is a false or perhaps toxic silence; indicative of a loss rather than a presence; a deprivation rather than an opportunity. It is the silence in the title of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is the silence of social control, domination, and death. It is silence achieved with a muzzle. It is sensory deprivation and isolation.

The pursuit of silence within the framework of civilization bears no resemblance to George Prochnik’s suggestion that seeking silence generally involves “the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world”. Another way to put this would be John Zerzan’s vision of “a world that doesn’t need running”. It’s not sufficient to silence the noise machine but rather there is an urgent need break it; not to run the world more efficiently but to give up control.

True silence makes it possible to listen. Either through refusal or inability, we haven’t truly listened in a very long time.

Coping with Monday

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“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

There are times when the mere specter of Monday can cast a shadow over the whole weekend. And yet, the weekend—whatever days of the week it happens to fall on for you—is what you are allotted. When people say they hate Mondays what they are really saying is that they hate their life for Mondays are a fairly regular occurrence. Likewise, longing for Friday is wishing one’s days away; anxious for life to pass; to be done with it.

But it is not quite right to simply hate Monday as if it were a brute fact of existence; the proper emotion is resentment. Resentment being defined as “a feeling of indignant displeasure or ill will at something regarded as wrong, insult, or injury.” For what is demanded of us—most of us anyway—is wrong; we would be foolish to regard it as anything less than both an insult and an injury. It’s a demand most would not submit to without the very real threat of being denied access to food and shelter.

What we are left with is mere leisure time. Bob Black has written that “Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work.” Leisure, in this sense, is both necessary and superficial; necessary but not sufficient. It’s time that is adequate for coffee breaks, sitcoms, and alcohol but little else.

What we are compelled to do without is time to figure out and experiment with how we wish to live. It is almost impossible to create a meaningful life in sporadic and limited spare time. Learning how to live is not a goal that can easily be relegated to weekends or fit into small, circumscribed blocks of time. There is little time to cultivate relationships, learn about where you live, listen to birds, write a letter, or even go for a walk when we must always be cognizant of getting back on time, staying on schedule, being presentable.

Slogans are accepted as truths because it’s faster and more convenient. The television provides a narrow range of opinions from which to select from and pundits for which to cheer. Social media provides us opportunities to show our support for one side or the other while also demonstrating we are within the normal range of opinion.

In her recently released book Living With a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich provides her own more tangible example:

“[T]he pressure to get assignments and meet deadlines, had trapped me in the world of consensual reality—the accepted symbols and meanings, the highways and malls, meetings and conferences, supermarkets and school functions. I seemed to have lost the ability to dissociate, to look beneath the surface and ask the old question, What is actually going on here?” (Ehrenreich, 202-203)

Given the obstacles, the implicit threats, and the disincentives, it is not surprising that few are concerned with how to live and instead are coerced to settle for mediocrity; we must seemingly never miss an opportunity to cut our losses for it is generally the best we can do. Most people are so badly beaten that an uninterrupted barrage of insults and injuries simply goes unnoticed. In the context of civilization, we are caricatures of ourselves realizing only a fraction of our potential; perhaps developing a few coping skills that wouldn’t otherwise be necessary. The most successful among us are simply coping rather than living.

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Interview with John F. Jacobi

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To start the new year, Uncivilized Animals is covering new ground with its first ever interview-style post. The subject of this first interview is John F. Jacobi, founder of UNC Freedom Club and one of the editors of the groups FC Journal. UNC Freedom Club describes itself as “an anti-industrial, ecological student group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill”.

The name Freedom Club may carry a certain connotation for those who identify as green anarchists and other critics of technology. How did you decide on the name for the group?

For those who don’t know, maybe I should note that “Freedom Club (FC)” was the name of the group who later turned out to be Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The intent behind the bombings was to get Kaczynski / FC’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” published in a major newspaper. He succeeded. And as far as I know, to this day Kaczynski has continued to refer to “FC” as a group.

But the name is not hinting at some kind of new armed struggle. In fact, some people who belong to the group have an overall negative impression of what Kaczynski did, even if we agree with his ideas on technology and industry (and, to the extent he talked about it, wildness).

But the compelling thing about Kaczynski wasn’t his ideas or his political actions, it was his relationship with wildness and life. When I wrote Kaczynski, I got the impression that his interactions with me were, ironically, very mechanical, as though he structured them just right so they would work perfectly as part of the larger revolutionary machine. But there are more relatable aspects to Kaczynski’s character. Take, for example, this excerpt from an interview first published in Green Anarchist:

“This is kind of personal,” he begins by saying, and I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape. He says “no, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself” and he laughs. “Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can’t figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn’t catch him and why you would never see him… Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say ‘thank you Grandfather Rabbit.’ After a while I acquired an urge to draw snowshoe rabbits. I sort of got involved with them to the extent that they would occupy a great deal of my thought. I actually did have a wooden object that, among other things, I carved a snowshoe rabbit in. I planned to do a better one, just for the snowshoe rabbits, but I never did get it done. There was another one that I sometimes called the Will ‘o the Wisp, or the wings of the morning. That’s when you go out in to the hills in the morning and you just feel drawn to go on and on and on and on, then you are following the wisp. That was another god that I invented for myself.”

An essay that does quite well expounding on this aspect of Kaczynski’s character is “Freedom Club” by Julie Ault. The essay recounts some details from the lives of Kaczynski and Thoreau, pointing out the obvious parallels, and it also follows the life of James Benning, who is attempting to build a cabin based on the one Kaczynski built in Montana. The implicit message here was that all these people belonged to “Freedom Club,” and that was really where the idea to adopt that name for the club came from. It was just a beautiful narrative.

Ted Kaczynski, early 1970s, in Montana.

Ted Kaczynski, early 1970s, in Montana.

Of course, without the mail bombs, “Industrial Society and Its Future” would likely have never made it into print…or at least it would not have enjoyed the widespread distribution of being included in the Washington Post. Do you think the low-tech lifestyle alone—minus the violence and the political tracts—something to emulate? Basically is “dropping out” or, perhaps more charitably, “living by example” a good idea?

Not quite. Freedom Club was started with three basic ideas that everyone agrees on. The first one says that wildness is worth existing, and should be able to exist in a dignified manner. A healthy and free existence means wildness must pervade our lives. But, and this is the second idea, industrial technology destroys wildness, and will continue doing so unless it is ended or unless it ends itself. And the third idea is simply the logical conclusion of those two points: those on the side of wild nature must do everything they can to end industrial society.

I am not naïve enough to think that dropping out is the best effort we can make to save wildness. But we are still in the process of figuring out what that best effort looks like, or what even is possible, so there are some very specific things that need to be done right now in the area of theory, propaganda, and publications. Freedom Club is going to be doing those things.

Could you briefly trace your own intellectual or political trajectory? Basically, how did you arrive at your current worldview? Where did you start and where exactly are you now?

When I was living with my parents as a child, I read all the time, and since I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian, I spent a lot of time in the religion section of the library. By consequence, I ended up reading a lot of books about philosophy and political thought, since those sections were nearby. While I don’t remember reading those things and thinking they affected my worldview in any sort of drastic way, almost all of the texts making that major impact now are texts I at least attempted to read as a child. So I would definitely count that as the starting point of my intellectual growth.

Then there were a few years of espousing things that the adults in my life believed, of course. But the most significant thing that happened next is that in 2011, when Occupy happened, I was thrilled. I was very unhappy with the world around me, and though I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, Occupy seemed like it had potential to make that different. Besides, Occupy protesters couldn’t really articulate what they were unhappy with either. Unfortunately, I could only watch Occupy happen through the Internet. At the time, I was living with my aunt and uncle in a very rural North Carolina town, and no one was willing to drive me anywhere. So I did my best to interact with the movement how I could as a 16-year-old on a computer: I got introduced to some pretty radical thought through the magazine The New Inquiry, which I followed from the very beginning, I wrote and messaged people about the movement, and I considered calling myself an anarchist.

But before I really settled on that label, I wanted to give conventional politics a try. So the next year, I was living with my grandmother, and I asked if I could help out with the Obama campaign. She was against it for some reasons I can’t remember now, but I was adamant, so I eventually got to help out. It sucked. So much deceit and so many Machiavellian power plays. During the campaign I met someone who had worked with a group in Arizona called No More Deaths. She said it consisted of quite a few anarchists, at least when she went down there.

The project was compelling to me for quite a few reasons, and at that point I really wanted to explore the anarchist political label. Also, at that point in my life I wanted nothing less than to be free from school and my family, no matter what this meant. My father wasn’t providing any financial support at the time, and I was almost positive that he wasn’t going to when I left my grandmother’s, so I realized that No More Deaths was my best option. If I didn’t go to No More Deaths, I would be sleeping in a tent anyway, except I’d probably have the cops called on me then.

I actually never ended up going to No More Deaths. Instead I started dating my now ex-boyfriend, who was attending UNC. So, I figured, I would go with him to Chapel Hill where there was a fair amount of anarchist activity, at least as far as the news was concerned. Besides, I already had all the stuff I needed to make it through at least a few months of homelessness. Luckily, the anarchist community here in Chapel Hill helped me out a lot. They showed me where abandoned buildings were, where to get free food, and many of them let me sleep on their couches.

You’ll notice that at this point my story has become more personal than political, and that’s kind of what happened with my thought in general. While before I was concerned very much with abstract ideas, my life rapidly transitioned into one that cared about finding food, making friends, and reading wonderful stories.

And at some point during all this, I read an essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” and I loved it. For the first time, there was something that expressed what I had been feeling, and it did so in very rational way. Not that that’s the best kind of argument, but it was certainly appealing to me, since the only radical political arguments that I had heard up to that point were very moralistic and steeped in identity politics. But “Industrial Society and Its Future” was written by the Unabomber, and that made me feel weird. What did it mean that I had the same ideas as a guy who tried to blow people up?

Later, I read the essay “Why the future doesn’t need us,” which was a personal account of Bill Joy, a well-respected scientist and programmer, experiencing the same dilemma. Again and again I read similar accounts, and this really strengthened my ability to believe these things. Because it really speaks to the power of the Unabomber’s argument that scientists who could have received one of his bombs said publicly that he was right.

Since then I’ve been exploring more of those ideas. I don’t know if I would call myself an anarchist anymore. It’s not really a label that brings up questions I want to talk about. It has also been coming to my attention that the majority of U.S. anarchists outside of the group I regularly interact with have very different politics from me. So Freedom Club is kind of an exploration out of anarchism as a political label. I probably still technically fall within that category in some cases, and older anarchists are still helping me out quite a bit, but overall I’m developing into someone who could more appropriately be called a “luddite,” so for now that’s what I’ll call myself.

So it was Kaczynski’s “relationship with wildness” more than his politics or his ideas that were inspirational and your own politics have shifted over time from abstract to particular…how would you describe your own relationship with wildness?

My relationship with the wild is still developing. I’d say that in the day-to-day I experience wildness in an urban context: abandoned buildings, secret places I found when I was homeless, stuff like that. Places that are untamed but mostly hidden from sight, since they wouldn’t really be allowed to be wild if they weren’t on the margins.

When I can, though, I try to go out in the forests and mountains. They’re my favorite places to be, and really there’s no place wilder than wild nature. You can experience wildness in the city, but it’s a sick kind of wildness, wheezing, barely alive. In wild nature the spirit is thriving and beautiful. It fills everything and it puts you in this state of awe sometimes. It truly defines your time there. I’ve been trying to learn more wilderness skills so I can get out to the forests and mountains more, experience more of the freedom I’m fighting for. I don’t have a car, so I’d have to hitchhike out to these places once I have more time to, but it’s worth it.

What has your experience been promoting ideas critical of civilization, progress, and technology on a college campus? Are some sectors of the campus community seemingly more receptive to such ideas than others?

The experience has been good. One of the goals of the group is to stay small, kind of like a collective, so there hasn’t been a whole lot of non-personal outreach for the ideas on campus. Mostly we’re trying to figure out basic questions like how exactly to define “technology,” or what we mean when we say “wild.”

But I would say that the majority of the people involved have positive feelings toward these ideas. People really want to be free, you know? And, especially in the South, people love nature. Students in particular are either all for the ideas because of those reasons, or they’re immediately put off by them for what seems to be class reasons (working class people are more attracted to these ideas, for the most part).

The people I’ve had the most trouble with come from the community of political ideologues. Anarchists, liberals, and leftists who call themselves activists. They already have an ideology they’re trying to push, so they’re either dismissive of these ideas or they call them flat-out wrong. Which is fine. Many group members have realized that this project has strength not because of the political aspects, but because it really speaks to a fundamental desire for freedom that we all have. The things we are talking about aren’t lofty revolutions, but our every lives.

What is the UNC Freedom Club currently working on?

Well, there are a few different things.

1. Freedom Club’s main project is the FC Journal, so a big goal for the group is getting that journal to as many people as possible. FC Journal is meant to be something akin to the Dark Mountain Project, but with a little more analysis. The goal is to have a quality forum for discussion about the consequences of industry and what we can do about it, but another big goal is to have it be interesting to any random person who would pick it up.

2. Some of the group members are working on an essay “Beyond Anti-Capitalism,” which we’re really excited about. It’s going to do some scaffolding work for basic ideas we have, especially ones concerning technology, the anti-capitalist left, what wildness means after industry — stuff like that. The goal is to get feedback after this essay is published and then put out a more comprehensive book, “Technique.” “Technique” would kind of be like the “Das Kapital” of the anti-industrial position — except not nearly as theoretical, and written by 19 – 22 year olds. Hopefully it will be pretty comprehensive while still being accessible.

Ultimately, we want our collective to have some influence on the direction this kind of anti-industrial, rooted-in-wildness perspective goes, since it’s a pretty popular one worldwide, and, at least in my opinion, it certainly has the potential to be a big deal. Other than that, we have no lofty overarching goals, just a few concrete projects.

And in addition to that, I have seen some posters circulating that have been created by the group. One pointing out the fraud of “green” energy and another critical of body cameras as a way to end violence by the cops. Can we expect to see more stuff like that?

You’ll certainly see more posters. We want the online magazine to exist more than just online, so stuff will regularly be pulled and printed for distribution. One of those real-world things will be posters for every issue, which will go everywhere and be distributed to partner bookstores (we only have three of those, by the way, so if you own a bookstore, contact us!).

But the purely agitprop posters will definitely exist too. They’ll look more like the green energy poster than the body camera poster. I made the body camera poster, and while I think my anarchist friends really liked it, other members of Freedom Club thought the whole thing was way too charged for us, a young group. Before we do stuff like that, we need to better understand what it means to attack policing as a technology—whether in the form of surveillance, law enforcement, or the media—and better express that. Otherwise, our poster will get lost in the mixed bag of half-baked ideas.green energybody camera

But the green energy thing is very intentional. We put the green energy poster out because UNC is kind of bougie, full of people who talk about saving the earth. But we aren’t focused on the environment, per se, we are focused on wildness, and we are explicitly anti-industrial. The poster does well in making that distinction clear, scaring off the middle-class “activists” who are more concerned about the energy crisis than they are dying ecosystems.

More posters like that will focus on Google’s autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, and especially biotechnology. They’re great ways of getting these ideas in front of people who otherwise wouldn’t pay attention, and it expands those ideas’ presence into the real world. In other words, posters are one of the most effective ways of spreading wild values — which is the crux of what Freedom Club wants to do.

Are you aware of any other student group similar to UNC Freedom Club on any other campus?

Nope, but I’d love to see them pop up.

If someone were considering starting such a group on their campus and wanted to contact you, how might they do that?

I can thing of two major things, and they go for any student group.

First, contact people outside of the university. Work hard to build relationships with people who do the thing you’re trying to do. FC-like groups should contact bloggers, speakers, people who are influential and start a dialogue with them. Lots of people are out there willing to help, and as students we have this great opportunity to use the university name in our byline, which really draws attention.

Second, use the damn resources. Most universities are willing to throw away money for the sake of student groups. Groups here get thousands of dollars each semester. Use that to print things, to bring in speakers, or even just to have one crazy, well-attended campus event.

And, just a last thing, be sure to contact FC. We’d be happy to help you out.

To learn more about UNC Freedom Club visit uncfc.org More about the FC Journal can be found at http://thejournal.link/

Least Popular Posts of 2014

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If you missed a post over the course of the past year, it was probably one of these. Fairly or unfairly, here are a handful of what have proven to be the least popular posts from 2014:

  • Cities are a Failed Experiment / January 21, 2014
    Human beings are a part of nature but the alien and artificial habitat of the city is not.

  • The Infrastructure of Totalitarianism / January 24, 2014
    [T]he future is already taking hold.  Levandowski says that to his three year old child, Adam, “everything’s a robot”.

  • WIRED Advises We Submit to Tech’s Embrace / March 13, 2014
    In two recent opinion pieces appearing in WIRED (March 10, 2014), the publication’s tech enthusiasts have seemingly taken on the tone of rape apologists or perhaps the tone of rapists and abusers themselves.
  • Without a Word for Animal / April 22, 2014
    Can we avoid having our minds warped with speciesim given language that we seemingly have little alternative but to employ?

  • Speaking for Animals…or Why You’re Not the Lorax / May 5, 2014
    Rats lean toward escalating tactics while mice are generally more concerned that such actions may provide a pretext for increased government repression.

Flipping Metaphors

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Animal liberation activists appropriately scoff at hearing nonhuman animals referred to as “it” rather than “he”, “she”, “they”, or “them”. The shift to pronouns is a small thing to alter one’s language in such a way so as to recognize the fact that animals are subjects rather than objects; that they are different, in morally significant ways, from tables and chairs. It is a significant gesture with real consequences. Using language in this way effectively reminds people that animals are individuals. I say “reminds” because most people know this on some level even if it doesn’t always sufficiently influence their interactions with other animals.

It should be noted that the Associated Press’ Stylebook advises against referring to animals in this way unless the animal in question already has a (human-given) name. A dog named Ringo can be referred to as “he” whereas a no-name deer who dies on the road, perhaps struck by a car, is to be referred to with terms such as “it”, “that”, or “which” (the same way one would refer to the car that struck the deer).

Insofar as animals are like us in having names they can be referred to in ways like we refer to ourselves—with appropriate pronouns.

Similar to using pronouns for animals, I would recommend deliberately crafting our sentences in such a way so as to recognize (or tacitly assert?) the agency of nonhuman actors including, but not limited, to animals. For example, we may say:

The full moon commanded my attention.

The mountain moved into view.

The sunlight raced to meet the water.

The sky was angry.

In this way, the natural world is thrust into the foreground rather than merely serving as background for an exclusively human drama. It is another way to build reminders into our language; reminders that humans are not alone in the world but share it with others.

It may be objected that such a poetic way of framing things is not always appropriate or desirable. And yet, to dismiss this way of speaking as simply poetic flourish is to miss the point. It is not poetic license that allows us to treat animals as moral subjects. It need not be poetic to attribute agency to nonhuman actors or entities.

In their 2002 book Tree Cultures, Owain Jones and Paul Cloke write:

“once we release ourselves from trying to squeeze all notions of agency through the very human grid of language and thought, the capacity for agency can be redistributed throughout a heterogenous set of actors, including non-human actors.” (p. 7)

We can deliberately define terms in a miserly way so as to highlight our differences from others or we may define terms in ways that highlight our continuities. Either choice can be made in an intellectually defensible way and so pragmatic factors must often guide our choice.

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram points out that “[w]e regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks. Yet these are more than mere metaphors…this language “belongs” to the animate landscape as much as it “belongs” to ourselves.” (p. 82)

And in Becoming Animal, Abram suggests that “our manner of understanding and conceptualizing our various ‘interior’ moods” may have been “originally borrowed from the moody, capricious earth itself.” Meaning that “our image of anger, and livid rage” may be derived from “our ancestral, animal experience of thunderstorms, and the violence of sudden lightening.” “Our sense of emotional release,” may have “been fed not only by the flow of tears but also by our experience of rainfall…our concept of mental clarity…nourished by the visual transparence of the air and the open blue of the sky” (p. 153).

So if metaphors serve to explain something, namely, to explain the unfamiliar in the terms of the familiar, and if we are immediately and intimately familiar with the physical world, our application of certain terms may be most directly and most appropriately applicable to the physical world. And only derivatively (or metaphorically?) applicable to what we may call our “interior” states. The order of explanation has been reversed; the metaphor effectively flipped.

Which is to say that there is a very real sense in which the sky may really be angry and not simply metaphorically so. It may be the case that when I say “I am angry” it is more metaphor than when I say “the sky is angry”. So while I am suggesting this alteration to our way of speaking as something of a stylistic suggestion and as a pragmatic means of spreading certain values, it is not without intellectual justification. We may proceed in good faith.

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A Skewed View: Rejecting Misanthropy

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Human beings appear to be the problem. Human beings cause climate change, drive other species to extinction, turn the oceans to acid and fill them with plastic. Human beings build slaughterhouses, animal laboratories, and concentration camps. Human beings appear to be the common denominator in almost every atrocity.

It is no wonder that those concerned about other animals or the Earth itself have a tendency to be somewhat misanthropic. Misanthropy is commonplace even if often concealed as a tactical decision when interacting with others. But for many, the basic problem is that the human species is fundamentally flawed…and there is no fix for that. Even David Attenborough has referred to humans as “a plague on the Earth”. The commentary in radical circles is often quite similar.

And yet, the drift toward misanthropy is based on a very basic mistake. It is making a species level judgment based on a narrow sliver of individuals who are not in any way representative of the species as a whole. The vast majority of human beings who are currently alive are living in the midst of soul-crushing civilization. We are toothless and de-clawed tigers frantically pacing whereas most who have come before us lived in the world rather than this cage. To make any reliable judgment about the fundamental nature of humanity—suggesting that it’s incurably flawed or inherently destructive—based on this outlying historical moment is impossible. It is akin to visiting a fraternity house to gauge contemporary sexual mores.

In Wandering God, Morris Berman explains that one cost of civilization is that we lose trust in the world and in other human beings (56). This is a significant and underappreciated cost; it’s not quite tangible and so we seemingly forget to put it on the scale when calculating civilization’s toll. We ought to be able to trust other human beings and yet the keys in our pocket shows we can’t.

This misanthropy can have at least two distinct and destructive consequences. The first is a debilitating sense of hopelessness. And while it has been suggested that hopelessness can be an asset toward waging a fiercer fight it is more likely to produce a futile flailing of the limbs rather than any serious assault. It doesn’t help us avoid burnout but instead is the definition of burnout.

The second consequence is a temptation to implement highly repressive measures to contain the virus of humanity. In short, ecofascism (or perhaps plain old fascism). It is visible, for example, in the practice of evicting indigenous people from their land so that that land can be “preserved” as a park free from human habitation.

Fortunately, backing up and recognizing that most humans were never civilized subjects, were never harmed in that way, allows us to dismiss the misanthrope’s skewed view by correcting her sampling error. Berman again:

“Our experience of politics has been conditioned by aberrant circumstances. The state—an autonomous political unit having a hierarchical, centralized government capably of levying taxes, making war, and enforcing laws—has been with us for only about six thousand years. The majority of human political experience has been relatively (though not entirely) egalitarian” (2)

Mistrust of nature generally and of human beings specifically is a grave harm inflicted by civilization. Civilization suggests that human being are fundamentally flawed and too many people within radical circles are happy to accept that claim. I believe a fuller picture of human history provides ample grounds on which to defend ourselves and reject misanthropy.

by Mr. Fish (www.clowncrack.com)

by Mr. Fish (www.clowncrack.com)

An Unenviable Position

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In the current issue of Fifth Estate (Fall/Winter 2014), John Zerzan writes:

“There is an understandable, if misplaced, desire that civilization will cooperate with us and deconstruct itself. This mind set seems especially prevalent among those who shy away from resistance, from doing the work of opposing civilization. There is also a tendency to see a dramatic showdown looming, even though history rarely seems to provide us with such a scenario.” [emphasis added] [1]

I immediately stopped, re-read, and churned over that potent phrase: “the work of opposing civilization”. To say it aloud is to wonder exactly what it’s comprised of. What exactly is the work of opposing civilization? To ask the question is to realize the unenviable position that those who oppose civilization find themselves in. We have the most grandiose of ambitions and yet possess the most meager of resources. For many or most of us, we barely know where to start.

Indeed, it is a question that is not too infrequently posed to Zerzan himself. Callers to his weekly radio show Anarchy Radio, sometimes new (and sometimes not) to anti-civ thinking ask: and now what? What is to be done? What should we be doing?

It’s an embarrassingly difficult question. There may be many answers but none seem to be entirely adequate.

Likewise, the recent issue of Black Seed (#2), includes an article from publisher Aragorn! in which he writes:

“Painfully, I don’t believe we are even at the stage of a debate about tactics, but are instead at a preliminary discussion on how to conceive of the problem, which at some point may turn into a sharing of ideas about strategy that may result in a debate about tactics.” [emphasis in original] [2]

So for Aragorn! “what should we do?” is not only a difficult question, it’s a premature question!

Given this unenviable position, which is exacerbated by the quickening pace of ecological devastation and the exponential spread of civilization’s poison, there exists the possibility that bad ideas will not be adequately scrutinized but instead acted upon by those who are understandably desperate for action.

A most obvious and fairly recent example of this is Derrick Jensen’s and Lierre Keith’s Deep Green Resistance (It’s a book! It’s group! It’s a new/old flavor of resistance!). The (seemingly brief) appeal of DGR is most readily explained by the fact that it is a plan even if it’s not a good plan. It’s a call for troops and with an evident war being waged against the planet there were many eager to sign up.

Another predictable reaction to the unenviable position of those opposed to civilization is to abandon hope, to accept and almost welcome defeat; to be aloof and above the fray, too cool to care. But this is a position more appropriate for a spectator placing bets on the outcome of a game than for a participant who has a stake in the matter. In the same issue of Black Seed as quoted above there is a column titled “It’s All Falling Apart” which is essentially a collection of somewhat absurd news items from the mainstream press included for their comic value. But the column itself is prefaced with the following text presumably from the editors:

“The end of the world will not come in a bang, a clarion call of trumpets, and the dawning of a new era. The end of the world will be decades, if not centuries, of immiseration and degradation that will humiliate and starve us…The end of the world isn’t going to be exciting or heroic, it’ll be bright, flashy, and mediocre.” [3]

The passage echoes Zerzan’s remark about the misplaced hope for a “dramatic showdown”; it is agreed that there will be no such event. But whereas Zerzan makes the point so as to urge greater levels of resistance, the Black Seed passage is thoroughly disempowering. No dramatic showdown on the horizon for Zerzan means that we must do the work of opposing civilization—whatever that may be. No dramatic showdown for Black Seed means a future of “immiseration and degradation” where we are starved and humiliated; the work to be done in this case would simply be to develop a thick hide and a tolerance for pain.

[1] John Zerzan. (Fall/Winter 2014) “A Word on Civilization and Collapse,” Fifth Estate (392): 17-18.
[2] Aragorn! (Fall 2014) “Answers to Questions Not Asked: Anarchists and Anthropology,” Black Seed (2): 10.
[3] “It’s All Falling Apart,” Black Seed (2): 26.

Birds, Bats, and the Occult

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Turkey_vulture (1)In 1920, Herbert H. Beck of Franklin & Marshall College published a short article in The Auk, a publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union. His article was titled “The Occult Senses in Birds”.

While Beck was explicit in his allegiance to the idea of human superiority—describing the human mind as “Nature’s master product” and other animals as “below man”—he could not deny that certain animal abilities exceeded those found in human beings; that humans had lost something as they pulled away from other animals. He wrote:

certain senses widely or selectively a part of animal life, are absolutely gone in man. So thoroughly are these senses atrophied or lacking in the human mind that man with all his highly developed imagination cannot even vaguely visualize the subtle processes by which they operate

As examples of occult powers which he believed to be highly developed in birds but absent in humanity, Beck addresses a homing sense, a food-finding sense, and a mate-finding sense.

Beck argues that acute vision and great memory are insufficient to explain the migration of birds who cover vast distances across unfamiliar terrain. Beck shares anecdotal evidence that he believes supports the claim that sight and smell alone cannot account for the turkey vulture’s (and other scavengers’) ability to find food. And at his most (admittedly) speculative, Beck suggests a mate-finding sense which may exist but resorts to observations of insects to bolster the claim before concluding that “unfortunately research on these occult senses is difficult—often impossible.”

At this point, depending on one’s perspective, it may be disappointing, a great relief, or simply anticlimactic to discover that Beck does not mean to imply that these occult powers are to be understood as in any way supernatural. He explains that

intimately interwoven with the life histories of thousands of animal species of past ages and many species of the present day there is an active sense which may be called occult simply because it is hidden from the experience and understanding of man

So what strikes modern ears as a highly sensational title hides a fairly reasonable claim: other animals possess senses and ways of knowing that are unavailable to human beings. This may be because such senses have atrophied and been lost or possibly because we never possessed them in the first place. More from Beck’s article:

All phases of the occult sense have long since been lost in the channels of life that progressed toward civilized man; they exist only selectively in animals below man to-day; but they are still an important factor of existence in many life forms, as they have been a potent determinant in past ages.

Over fifty years after Beck’s article and forty years ago to the month, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a highly influential article in the October 1974 issue of The Philosophical Review titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. In his article, Nagel chides his colleagues noting that:

Philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different

Nagel, not being an ornithologist like Beck or a chiropterologist as his title might suggest, is not principally concerned with determining which species possess which senses to what extent. Instead, he is grappling with the difficulty inherent in understanding the nature of consciousness; if it’s possible to explain consciousness without leaving anything out. Nagel’s principal point is that “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism”.

To take his example of a bat, we may be highly confident that there is something it is like to be a bat even if that experience and knowledge is inaccessible to human beings. In contrast, we are probably less confident that there is something it is like to be a rock.

Nagel explains:

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life…No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us

and more specifically,

bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we [human beings] possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine

If I were to speculate, I would think that Beck would categorize bat sonar as an occult power; and while avoiding that particular buzzword, Nagel seems to be in agreement as it is clearly “hidden from the experience” of human beings.

Unfortunately, the real significance of this observation seems to have been lost on Beck who repeatedly affirms human superiority in his article. The realization that there are many ways of knowing and ways of being in the world that are completely alien to humanity should be quite humbling. Other animals know things that humans do not know and cannot know.

Gigadeath: The Metric of Transhumanism

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“Giga-death is the characteristic number of human deaths in a
major 21st century war.” (173)*

As previously addressed here at Uncivilized Animals, anarcho-primitivists have been harshly criticized for suggesting that the size of the current human population is not compatible with a living earth that can also support other forms of life. This assertion has lead to vitriolic accusations labeling primitivists as genocidal.

Ironically, the most genuine alternative to primitivism—transhumanism—also has what we might call a genocide problem…and it is not simply an accusation made by the most uncharitable of critics; rather it has been voiced by one of their own.

Meet Hugo de Garis:Hugo_de_Garis

“I see humanity splitting into two major political groups, which in time will become increasingly bitterly opposed, as the artilect issue becomes more real and less science fiction like.” (11)

“I am so pessimistic that I am glad to be alive today. At least I will die peacefully in my bed. However I fear for my grandchildren. They may well see the horror of it and very probably they will be destroyed by it. (17)

The above quotes are from de Garis’ book The Artilect War. In the book, de Garis lays out a doomsday scenario where the development of artifical intellects (hence his term “artilect”) divides humanity into two rival camps: Cosmists and Terrans. The Cosmists are those who wish to rapidly move forward with the development of these seemingly god-like artilects while the Terrans are essentially the Luddites who aim to halt the project seeing it as an existential threat to humanity. The Cosmists are purportedly motivated by awe whereas the Terrans are motivated by fear.

The two camps will be so passionate about their respective positions that billions will die in the conflict. Given his idiosyncratic tendency to coin new terms and acronyms, de Garis labels the result as “gigadeath”.

One startling aspect is that de Garis’ own area of research has been the development of artificial brains and intelligences. Before retiring in 2010, he was the director of Xiamen University’s Artificial Brain Lab in China. So what he is suggesting is that the most deadly war in the history of humanity (“a planetary civil war” (86) which will destroy his grandchildren) is a likely—perhaps even inevitable—consequence of his life’s work.

“I feel terribly guilty in many ways, because I feel that my own work is part of the problem.” (82)

And while he may express some guilt, it is apparently not the kind of guilt that results from feeling one has made a serious mistake or would do things differently if given the opportunity; it’s guilt without regret. In The Artilect War he dedicates a whole chapter a set of arguments that could be employed by the Cosmists and an additional chapter for arguments that could be employed by the Terrans (these are probably the two most worthwhile chapters of his needlessly long book), but he does not pretend to be neutral; he is, at heart, a Cosmist.

“If such a war does occur, killing billions, “gigadeath,” doesn’t that make me a monster, and the worst monster, worse than the monsters of Hitler, the Japanese, Stalin and Mao? Yet despite all this, I push on, because at the deepest level, I’m a Cosmist. I think that NOT building the artilects would be an even greater tragedy.” (84)

Humans “are of zero significance on a cosmic scale” (88) and so for de Garis there is no number of human death that could outweigh the pursuit of an intelligence that would purportedly be trillions of trillions of trillions of times more advanced than human intelligence. The loss of human being is in fact no loss at all. This is transhumanism.

By way of conclusion, it is important to note that amongst transhumanists de Garis is not a fringe figure. He has appeared in films such as Transcendent Man (a documentary on Ray Kurzweil), Singularity or Bust, and the BBC’s Human v2.0. His work is taken seriously be prominent transhumanist organizations and websites such as the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Humanity+, Singularity University, and KurzweilAI. He has been the subject of numerous interviews within transhumanist circles and The Artilect War has been widely reviewed by his colleagues. His work has been referenced in mainstream publications such The New York Times and Forbes magazine.

The existence of transhumanists such as de Garis creates something of a dilemma. On one hand, it is tempting to dismiss them as kooks or perhaps value them simply for the entertainment value of their grandiose aspirations. On the other hand, their fantasies do not need to be feasible in order for the pursuit of such fantasies to be genuinely dangerous.

Addendum:
de Garis predicts that Ted Kaczynski may eventually come to be regarded as “the first Terran” who was “decades ahead of his time” striking out at proto-Cosmists and that he may eventually occupy a historical place similar to that of abolitionist John Brown (174)

Note:
Hugo de Garis’ The Artilect War can be read in its entirety online at:
http://profhugodegaris.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/artilectwar.pdf

*Numbers in parentheses all refer to de Garis’ The Artilect War.

 

The Universe is Expanding

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It takes a peculiar kind of mind–a highly civilized mind to be sure–to actively worry about the fact that the universe is expanding. The same could be said for worry about what will happen when the sun burns out. I say “civilized” because such anxiety seemingly stems from a perceived lack of control and the civilized, perhaps by definition, aspire toward complete control.

Only the civilized could interpret the fact that the universe is expanding as a problem which requires a solution rather than simply as a brute fact about existence. Indeed, refusal to accept things as given is both virtue and vice of the civilized mind.

In any case, rarely are such facts as the eventual burning out of our sun cited as grounds for accepting or rejecting a given political theory. Yet in a recent interview with John Zerzan, a VICE Magazine interviewer made the following observation:

One thing I wonder about—and Stephen Hawking has brought this up—is that life on Earth will eventually be destroyed by either a meteorite or finally the sun burning out. [Hawking] has suggested that our only hope of survival is to colonize outer space…

The implication being that anarcho-primitivism cannot provide the tools necessary for adequately responding to an expanding universe; it doesn’t place humanity in a position to colonize space and outlive the sun…consequently it must be rejected. The interviewer overlooks climate change, overlooks species extinction, overlooks how life on Earth is being destroyed right at this very moment in ways that are much more local and immediate than astronomical and distant.

An astute reader could point out that Hawking and the VICE interviewer are also concerned about meteorites and that the threat of meteorites cannot confidently be placed billions of years into the future. Perhaps meteorites are the reason that anarcho-primitivism should be rejected? Could The Argument from Meteorites be the silver bullet argument that renders primitivism implausible: we simply must prepare to obliterate any incoming meteor before it obliterates us–and primitivists are soft on meteorites.

In an article titled “We Can Survive Killer Asteroids–But it Won’t Be Easy” appearing in WIRED in 2012, Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that “[o]nce in about a hundred million years…Earth is visited by an impactor capable of annihilating all life-forms bigger than a carry-on suitcase.” A most interesting metric to be sure!

Tyson elaborates:

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, we would be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy, for having a large brain and a space program, yet we met the same fate as that pea-brained, space program-less dinosaurs that came before us.

We cannot make the same mistake as the dinosaurs or be the butt of any alien jokes! And so Tyson would have us enter a space race with hypothetical aliens who are hypothetically in the lead.

At this juncture, I can only point out that the limits of anarcho-primitivism are precisely what make it compelling. An anarcho-primitivist society could not manage a nuclear power plant, rely on satellite communication, drop bombs from airplanes, etc. Likewise, as Stephen Hawking- and Neil deGrasse Tyson-inspired critics point out, they also could not chart the path of asteroids far into the future and actively avoid or destroy a devastating meteorite.

It is my position that the steps necessary to create a civilization capable of diverting meteorites would impose a worse cost on itself and its members than the meteorite could inflict.

There is a reason why anarchists tends to run things like coffee shops and bookstores rather than space programs. Anarchism does not scale up very well; to be plausible it must be primitivist.

Asteroid-impact-resize