Tom: One of the most common tools used by those defending technologies of the domesticated, and when arguing for an intensification of civilisation on the hallowed road of Progress, is that of the cost-benefit analysis – often utilising monetary symbols - and using economic analysis and reductionist logic to decide whether something’s worth doing or not. George Monbiot, for example, recently published a cogent analysis of this trend
here, writing that a government report on ecosystems utilising the practice is
"total nonsense, pure reductionist gobbledegook, dressed up in the language of objectivity and reason, but ascribing prices to emotional responses: prices, which, for all the high-falutin' language it uses, can only be arbitrary. It has been constructed by people who feel safe only with numbers, who must drag the whole world into their comfort zone in order to feel that they have it under control.
...The assessment, it tells us, establishes "the true value of nature … for the very first time". If you thought the true value of nature was the wonder and delight it invoked, you're wrong. It turns out that it's a figure with a pound sign on the front."
In the end, Monbiot decries this objectification as “the definitive neoliberal triumph: the monetisation and marketisation of nature, its reduction to a tradeable asset.” To simply assign this ‘triumph’ to neoliberalism, and fail to make the deeper historical links with the evolution of civilisation, simply lets far too much off the hook. This seemingly ultimate reduction of nature to a tradeable asset with a price tag, has clear roots in the civilised story of the world which was explored by Adam in the previous post on this blog. Nature as a productive human asset, nature as an object of human control artificially delineated and owned by a select few; these are symptoms of the processes of agriculture and civilisation – and relatively new ones by the standards of human history.
But what if we were to stay with the cost-benefit logic for a minute, and instead of consistently focussing this method narrowly on one instrument of human manipulation among many
, we were to actually use it to see if what we have today
was/is worth the cost of our culture – civilisation - and 10,000 years of constant destruction wrought on the biosphere and on ourselves?
Have the processes of civilisation and the development of agriculture really improved things inexorably between (roughly) 10,000 years ago and now? Proponents of the civilised paradigm of control would say “Of course, look at our lifespans! Look at our amazing technologies and scientific achievements!”, but the reality is, if lifespans (to use a very crude indicator of improved health, as discussed
here) did improve then it’s really only in the last 100 years that this has happened substantially, and these commonly-cited improvements are far from equitably shared.
As another African state
suffers from intense food insecurity and famine, Eurocentric commentators decry 'the Africans' for not being able to feed themselves, forgetting that it’s only in the last 150 years or so that Europe itself – apotheosis of civilisation - escaped deadly famines which, up to that point had been a frequent occurrence, as illustrated well by Clive Ponting in his authoritative Green History of The World
. Richard Manning has correctly written that “famine is a creation of farming”, and to say that almost 10,000 years of this cycle of starvation around the globe has been worth it is astounding.
Then augment this with levels of genocide and organised violence on a scale unthinkable to pre- and non-civilised peoples (an estimated 160 million human deaths in 20
th century wars alone – many of whom, as Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, can be directly attributed to the objectifying ‘rationalism’ of our culture). We must also include the callous and systematic slaughter of aboriginal peoples the world over to this account, all to satiate the centres of civilisation. (As Derrick Jensen writes in A Language Older Than Words, throw a dart at a map and, if you hit inhabitable land, you can be almost certain an atrocity directly linked to the imperialism of the civilised has occurred there). Also post-agricultural ecocide on an unprecedented scale can be ignored at our peril - the only mass extinction period caused directly by humans going on around us, as the geological concept of the
anthropocene enters common parlance.
There’s the mental illness, the sky-rocketing rates of death and disability caused by the anomie and separation of modern life. The physical illnesses unprecedented in human history too; is there a reason you were never taught during classes at school on the first agricultural revolution that human malaria, which has killed about 120 million people since 1914 alone, was
directly provoked by the topographical and societal changes wrought at this time. Let's not forget plagues like smallpox – which killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century alone - and TB. If you're wondering where their deadly origins lie, it's with the population densities and domestication necessitated by civilisation.
Now, was it worth it?
The beacon of hope is that ultimately, through a Primitivist critique or ourselves and our society, we can shout a collective “no”, and start to fumble towards the shared root of these atrocities. Finally, we can start edging towards a mode of thought which won’t allow such unjustifiable horrors to occur without question. This blog is about acknowledging that it wasn’t worth it; that we can’t allow the arrogance of the victors override the truth of the past. Humanity won’t go back, but we can alter course drastically. We can, as it were,
return home.
