Kierkegaard’s torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one’s condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man’s torments for their own amusement.
In his Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker frames human civilization as the sum of our “immortality projects,” our symbolic attempts to defend our psyches against the certainty of death. But modern man’s “heroic cultural illusions” have begun to buckle under the weight of his growing knowledge. Of modern man, Becker said, “he has been disinherited by his own analytical strength,” his intellectual powers making him cynical. “The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naïve belief, of simple-minded hope.” We ourselves recede as the power of our illusions grows. As our “heroic cultural illusions” grow in power, so does the life of the individual seem ever more demeaning; attempting to conquer death, to give some lasting meaning to the short, desperate gasp that is life, we have both stripped the life of the individual of meaning and hastened the final end of our species. Our hope of getting outside of and forgetting our “creatureliness,” as Becker puts it, has meant voluntary exile from nature—and, with such exile, death.
Even the most cosmopolitan and open-minded yet harbor, and hardly bother to hide, their condescension toward uncivilized styles of life. We’re sure of this much, at least: that the advent of civilization was a triumph, and that the primitives were missing something. It’s not just that they were missing something materially, lacking in wealth, but that they were missing something mentally and psychologically—like children in their lack of sophistication, wild animals in their savagery. How little we modern (perhaps now postmodern) people understand ourselves to so shamelessly call the kettle black. As anthropologist Ian Tattersall observes in his book Masters of the Planet, it took repeated discoveries “to convince the world that you could indeed have both a sophisticated mind and a ‘primitive’ lifestyle.” Recent turns toward simplicity, minimalism, and mindfulness may indeed hint that a primitive lifestyle is the practical corollary of a sophisticated mind, however unimaginable that may be to moderns. Our opinions about the relative merits of hunter-gatherer societies are, like most of human beings’ opinions, much stronger than can be justified.
The question of what progress is and whether we would know it if we saw it are seldom seriously raised—perhaps because the deep subconscious harbors the suspicion that sedentism and, following from that, complete industrial and technological detachment from the natural world were, in fact, fundamentally doomed surrenders to sociopathic powerlust. And our deepest selves are all the time rebelling against it, as is apparent to anyone paying even a little attention. As Robin Fox asks, “Will we come to understand that consciousness can only exist out of context for so long before it rebels against its unnatural exile?” We believed we could completely cut ourselves off from the rest of life itself, making of ourselves aliens in our own home. Only observe how it has indeed alienated us. We’re more at home staring numbly and blankly at glowing screens than we are socializing with real flesh-and-blood people. Though we understand now that our appetites for digital interfaces—our experience as users—are quite literally changing the shapes of our brains, we somehow fail to see in this a threat. Rather, we are so devoted to the growth and progress dogmas that we greedily pursue ways of extincting ourselves. As we go into wild-eyed rhapsodies about someday soon becoming a multi-planetary species, we trash the one planet we have.
We human beings increasingly see ourselves as minds without bodies, something apart and existing virtually in our digital presence: usernames, passwords, account numbers, and identification numbers of various kinds, financial data, the emails and work product we generate, etc. We are beginning to complete the process of our separation from the biosphere—to consummate our domestication and, therefore, alienation. What is the end game? “What makes us special, while we remain rooted in nature?” The people of the future may not have to face this question, having divined a solution to the problem it seems to pose: how do we fully and finally release ourselves—meaning, one supposes, our minds—from the limits and the suffering of the natural world. A recent series, Alien Worlds, imagines, as a highly advanced technological civilization, a race of immortal collections of disembodied neural tissue, sitting immobile in vats of nutrient-rich fluid, masters of “a fully closed ecology of robots that can self-reproduce in space.” It is hard to conceive of such a vision as anything other than a nightmare, notwithstanding this civilization’s apparent lack of sickness, suffering, or death. Kirkpatrick Sale frequently reminds us of Herbert Read’s words: “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive good control of these machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.”
Our technologies—our decisions about what to invent and adopt—are not absent of ideological character but deeply defined by it, the products of our worldviews and values. The goal is not to discard technology altogether, which is not possible for human beings, but to actively, mindfully take up the question of the connection between our technologies and our values and lifeways, opposing “the kinds of technologies that are, at root, destructive of human lives and communities.” People did not adopt sedentary agriculture lifestyles willingly; they had to be kidnapped and beaten into it, aware that these unnatural lifestyles meant violent domination, hierarchy, and material poverty. As James C. Scott documents so thoroughly in Against the Grain, “there is massive evidence of determined resistance by mobile peoples everywhere to permanent settlement, even under relatively favorable circumstances.” Scott thus challenges the accepted narrative of human prehistory, which insists that “[t]hose who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt.” The testimony of history has been painstakingly blotted out, though not entirely. Again and again, the English colonists relate the same story: there were a great many Englishmen ready to give up civilization to adopt the Indians’ way of life, but there were very few Indians who did not “become disgusted with our manner of life,” as Benjamin Franklin puts it. Consider that these are some of the few people in history to whom life presented a meaningful choice between, if we may, civilization and pre-civilization modes of life. The pre-national history of my native Massachusetts is replete with stories of the threat presented by the woods—the enticing power of nature next to fledgling civilization. The mere observation of the Indians’ ways of life, their happily living on the freely given bounty of nature without the absurd trappings of civilization, seems to have provoked an existential crisis in many more colonists than we know.
We’re told that nature, too, is harsh, unforgiving, violent. And while this is of course true, it is only trivially so, for the violence of nature is held in a careful balance by forces that have developed slowly, plodding along for untold millennia. The violence that human technologies have inflicted upon the natural world is rampageous and exponential, and it will outrun the ability of nature’s systems to absorb its assaults.
Any pointed criticism of global civilization’s malignant, totalizing influence may be the last great heresy. The dominant institutions are aghast at the mere suggestion that human wellbeing may not be served by the reduction of our existence to zombie-like production and consumption—that we might look for a freedom deeper than the narrow, abasing freedom of “consumer choice.” Indeed, as it becomes clearer that the existing plenitude of consumer goods and technological devices is not necessarily serving human well-being—and may well undermine it—we can hope for a shift in the way we have thought about politics, economics and society.
