Empires Crumble
Further Thoughts on Kingsnorth’s Machine Series, Part II
In my last post on Paul Kingsnorth’s Tale of the Machine series, I discussed the complexity of what he set out to do. It’s even in the blurb of Kingsnorth’s forthcoming book: “how a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human.” I wouldn’t presume to know what everyone feels, but I agree wholeheartedly that the force(s) that shape our lives withstand easy definition. This is why I prefer to follow Thomas Merton in naming this system The Unspeakable. Calling it The Machine does give it a sort of eerie, calculating, and impersonal quality, despite the ways we tend to give an animus, a personal character, to the Unspeakable. I noted how his attempt to define this thing causes a bit of mental whiplash as Kingsnorth gropes for clarity on what precisely this is. He’s trying to lasso an amoeba, or put a fence around a jellyfish. It doesn’t quite work, in my opinion.
As vague as The Machine is, Kingsnorth does give concrete aspects of the Machine. This is where the muddiness of what he is attempting to describe becomes the most clear. The list of characteristics he offers, though, do not differ much from most characterizations one can find of civilization or empire:
Centralised, hierarchical, large-scale society.
Effective bureaucracy, able to order and monitor citizenry.
Military/police might to enforce order.
Large population, mostly urban/metropolitan, reliant on Machine for survival and thus inclined to defend it.
Centrally-directed economy; powerful financial institutions.
Need to expand via colonisation (via military might, international treaties or commercial pressure) to secure further markets and resources.
Propaganda system, designed to normalise the above (‘the media’).
He later lists the values of the Machine:
Progress: central myth of Machine age. Material improvement in all areas is both necessary and inevitable. The future will always be better than the past.
Openness: limits are shackles, borders are offensive, self-definition is a right. All should be exposed, taboos must be shattered. Happiness will result from fewer restrictions.
Universalism: Machine values are applicable everywhere and should be available to everyone by right, given their liberatory nature (see above).
Futurism: Against the past, against place. History is to be escaped from, roots are limits to progress, and possibly darkly prejudicial.
Individualism: fragmentation of place-based communities, family units and other traditional ways of organising, in favour of the promotion of personal desire and ambition.
Technologism: new technology is benevolent and inevitable, and despite hiccups should be embraced. ‘Technology is neutral’ and has no telos: it can be used for good or ill.
Scientism: ‘Science and reason’ as ‘objective’, utilitarian arbiters of value.
Commercialism: market values infiltrate all areas of life; fulfilment is to be found through material consumption.
Materialism: Gods, ghosts and other backward superstitions are to be transcended.
TINA: ‘there is no alternative’. The Machine is ‘absolutely irresistible … and ultimately beneficent.’ Opposition is naive idealism at best, and a dangerous denial of its benefits to the needy at worst. Anti-Machine frustration directed into ‘art’, now a neutered and saleable commodity.
I have no problem with this list. Ask anyone who has thought much about this stuff, and they might add this or that, or quibble with one of his items, but would likely produce a list of quite similar words and phrases. I just don’t think it adds a lot.
The characteristics he lists is essentially how most people would describe civilization, or, likewise, empire, which we might think of as the most extreme example of civilization run amok.
The values he details likewise reflect how most people would describe modernity or perhaps the wake of the European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the rational, the individual, and the material. Plenty of other thinkers have noted similar characteristics and values. Consider, for instance, the characterization of Empire that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri theorized in their book Empire:
The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules of the entire “civilized world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace–a perpetual and universal peace outside of history. (xiv, xv).
So my problem is not that the list of characteristics and values is wrong, per say, but rather that it is simply the same language of empire foisted upon a new metaphor, his Machine.
This makes me wonder why Kingsnorth doesn’t just use empire–or civilization, empire’s nascent form–as his conceit. After all, we know from his recent Erasmus lecture that Kingsnorth is Against Christian Civilization. Why not just be against all civilization?
The anarcho-primitivist or “anti-civ” critique of civilization dovetails quite easily with the critical assessment of characteristics and values of The Machine outlined by Kingsnorth. The argument of anti-civ thinkers, like Paul Shepard, John Zerzan, and Derrick Jensen, and even academics like James C Scott or David Wengrow, is that civilization itself is the source of most of the ills of society.
The argument turns on a distinction between the diet and lifestyle practices associated with settled agriculture versus those of hunter gatherers. The latter way of living was called the Original Affluent Society by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, based on his study of contemporary hunter gatherers who he found to only have to work 3-5 hours per day to meet all their needs for food, shelter, and clothing, and were able to spend the rest of their time in leisure. He extrapolated that this was similar to all human cultures prior to the advent of agriculture. By moving camps to follow the seasonal availability of vegetative foods as well as the abundance of huntable wildlife, early humans could easily meet their nutritional needs. In fact, Mark Nathan Cohen, in his study Health and the Rise of Civilization, found that across the globe, the skeletal remains of cultures which took up agriculture show marked nutritional deficiencies when compared to those of hunter gatherers. Grain agriculture in itself does not have to lead to the ills now recognized with civilization, but it does make civilization possible in ways otherwise unfeasible with societies nourished by more perishable foods. So we might say that civilization is correlated with grain agriculture, but is not caused by it, since, as James C Scott notes, “the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.”
However the set of characteristics we now call civilization started, problems quickly piled up. Grain agriculture creates a primary food resource which can be stored long term, and therefore can be taxed and hoarded by those with power. Control of nutritional resources leads to wealth and social hierarchy. Grain agriculture depends upon a particular kind of nutrient rich, sunlit, and well drained soil, so its continued cultivation leads to deforestation of lowlands. Developments such as writing and numbering systems, hailed as hallmarks of civilization, signify the development of massive wealth inequality, since these are a tool of bureaucracy, often developed in tandem with taxation, so that governing bodies can detail the resources owed to them. The ability to tax and hoard grains creates the ability to live in cities, since cities almost always create a metabolic rift between the population density and the ability of the land base to provide the nutritional needs of the number of people (though this is not alway the case: the Aztec capital of Mexico City had incredibly productive chinampas gardens in the surrounding lake that may have provided most, if not all, of the nutritional needs of the city of thousands). A general disparity between the resource needs of a city and the ability of the hinterland to sustain it led to military expansion, thus requiring a strong military. So we see in some of the first epics of the Mesopotamian city states many of the characteristics associated with civilization: grain agriculture, record keeping, deforestation, charismatic military-kings, and colonizing expansion.
If the generally accepted narrative of history is that agriculture allowed the ability to grow and store food, leading humans out of a long period of volatile and fragile existence, the accumulated evidence actually supports the anti-civ thesis. Scott sums it up well in his book Against the Grain:
It turns out that the greater part of what we might call the standard narrative has had to be abandoned once confronted with accumulating archaeological evidence. Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gatherers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. The current fad of “Paleolithic” diets reflects the seepage of this archaeological knowledge into the popular culture. The shift from hunting and foraging to agriculture—a shift that was slow, halting, reversible, and sometimes incomplete—carried at least as many costs as benefits. Thus while the planting of crops has seemed, in the standard narrative, a crucial step toward a utopian present, it cannot have looked that way to those who first experienced it: a fact some scholars see reflected in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
From these first city-states, things only became more bleak throughout history. Large population swathes become enslaved. Kings conscripted the sons of peasants to fight their expansionist wars. Cities grow from hundreds to thousands, and then from thousands to millions, exponentially increasing their metabolic hunger and the rift between the resource needs and productivity of the land-base. A quote attributed to the Brittonic chieftain Calgacus, who fought the Roman army in Scotland in AD 83, offers a critique of empire. He is speaking about the Romans, but his criticism could be levied against any empire:
Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a wasteland and call it peace.1
Anti-civ arguments thus offer a sort of opposite to the ideology of progress. Proponents believe society is not getting better, it has gotten worse. In a way, the anti-civ discourse is a secular version of the Christian doctrine of the Fall. For anarcho-primitivists, however, the problem is not rebellion against God and banishment from Eden, but rather rebellion against nature by exiting Eden to create cities and civilizations.
This leads folks in the anti-civ space to have a sort of apocalyptic hope. They see no way out of the civilizational trap, and so must hope in a collapse which will reset the world stage so that humans can return to a “rewilded” world. In this world, there is no technology more advanced than flint knapping and basket weaving.
I’m sympathetic to this argument. The world would actually be a much healthier place if we didn’t have the entrapment of technologies that often provide ease or enjoyment (for some of us), but depend on such intense extraction of resources and labor.
Anti-civ arguments tend to rely on more materialist analyses of the problem of civilization, but would do just as well to take notes from Mumford (and Kingsnorth) that civilization is not simply about agriculture, but also about myth itself. Once in place, civilization uses the realm of myth in order to justify itself. Deforestation reframes to bringing order to chaos. Slavery becomes serving the will of the gods (filtered, of course, by the sovereigns and their bureaucrats). The sovereign, like the gods, is free to do what he wants and remains outside the legal codes which otherwise deem to provide a moral foundation for the imperial order. From Gilgamesh to the Hindu Vedas, to the Mayan Popol Vuh, these myths both assume and undergird the civilizations that produced them, whatever their prehistoric etymology.
Since myth, or cultural cosmology–that is, the kind of world we believe in–does shape how our society functions and inhabits the earth, then of course we ought to pay attention to it. As important as it is to examine the cosmological underpinnings of the empire that we live within, the search for alternatives would likewise depend upon finding cosmologies which support righter relationships in the world. This is why so many are attracted to learning from the remaining indigenous cultures in the world.
For instance, in his essay, “The Green Grace,” Kingsnorth holds up indigenous understandings of the earth as alive and full of animate nonhuman beings as part of a return to an anti-Machine way of living. But he doesn’t give a lot of concrete examples of this, other than advocating indigeneity as a goal.
Mumford indicates that if the Machine is indeed simply a myth, then all we must do is discontinue believing the myth. Kingsnorth closes his main essay on the Machine, “Blanched Sun, Blinded Man,” citing this theory, so appears tacitly to agree. But “just stop it,” as anyone who has tried to quit any number of unhealthy habits has found, is not so simple to do. It needs a more robust theory of change. (To be fair, Kingsnorth does go on to assert his idea of how to create change by instituting communities revolving around four concepts. I’ll discuss this more in a later essay).
In fact, I think cultural change depends upon two sides of a coin: the side of cosmology or myth, and the opposite side of action, that is, cultural practices undergirded by cosmology. The two sides reinforce each other and develop in tandem through feedback loops.
I’ll give two examples of how I think some specific cultural practices elucidate how indigenous cosmologies help to resist the excesses of the Unspeakable. Perhaps they might undo some of the worst aspects of civilization itself.
Robin Wall Kimmerer notes that in her Potawatomi language, everything is assumed to have animacy except for those objects made by people: table, tools, baskets. In contrast to English, in which everything except for humans is an “it,” the Potawatomi call an apple a being, and refer to bear people, beaver people, and even rock people. In this light, one of the problems of technology is that it transforms the world from beings into objects. We cut down trees to make chairs, killing the being to make the thing. Indigenous cultures do make useful things–clothes, tools, shelter–with the bodies of animals, but unlike in English, most don’t use language to swap the vivisected object for a living subject. Kimmerer helpfully advises us how to reintegrate animacy into our everyday language so that we might better see the agency and personhood of nonhumans. She proposes using the singular pronoun “ki” to describe other beings, and “kin” as the plural pronoun. So one might describe a cottonwood: ki grows by the creek. Similarly, for a swarm of bees, “kin are swarming around the queen on that oak branch.”
Another example: historically in Mayan culture, according to Martin Prechtel, knife making was an expensive undertaking. The cultural logic was that the action of humans in the world carried spiritual debts. For instance, killing an animal, or even harvesting a plant to eat means robbing from the life-force of that being. The only appropriate response to such an indebtedness is to use what is uniquely human–our hands–to create beautiful things: beadwork, song, tapestries. In creating beauty, humans might pay forward their debt to the world by offering something in return. Thus, even simple technology, such as an iron knife, represents an incredibly expensive endeavor, as one must repay the debt to the rock one has robbed for the vein of iron, must recompense the trees one has felled for coals to smelt the ore, must also address the debt made to the animal whose body one has used to secure the handle to the knife, and one must repay the wood or bone used in the handle of the knife. In such a culture, the debt one would rack up for the embodied energy and resources involved in a laptop would take several lifetimes to repay. Most of us are not Mayan, and will not consider ourselves so indebted, much less repay those ontological debts. However, the simple practice of considering the embodied energy and resource in the technology of our everyday lives can help us to be at least more thoughtful, and perhaps more discerning in our use.
All empires crumble. This is a raw fact, almost a thermodynamic principle of society. The contradictions cannot be held together. Rift between resource and requirement becomes a gaping wound, ever expanding as the tensions pull the center apart. Popular culture shows collapse as a violent occurrence. Wanderers scavenge for food. Scattered communities attempt to live together while protecting their resources. But in reality, collapse has happened thousands of times throughout history. Again, I’ll look to James Scott who takes into account the long view of history:
The “collapse” of an ancient state center is implicitly, but often falsely, associated with a number of human tragedies, such as high death toll. To be sure, an invasion, a war, or an epidemic may cause large-scale fatalities, but it is just as common for the abandonment of a state center to entail little if any loss of life. Such cases are better considered a redistribution of population, and, in the case of a war or epidemic, it is often the case that abandoning the city for the countryside spares many lives that would otherwise be lost. Much of the fascination with “collapse” comes to us from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But even in this classic case, it has been argued that there was no loss of population but rather a redistribution, as several non-Latin peoples, such as the Goths, were absorbed. On a wider view, the “fall” of the Empire restored the “old regional patchwork” that had prevailed before the Empire was cobbled together from its constituent units.
Gravity comes for all civilizations and empires, and the fall tends to be accompanied by increased freedom and improved livelihoods for most people. Civilizations and empires attempt to universalize. In their expansion, they subsume other people, languages, and regions, and decrease diversity by implementing their agendas, language, food, and customs on their subjects. So when empires collapse and civilizations fail, the end result is an increase in diversity as fractured regions fall back to the cultural practices which work best in the region.2
For those feeling the pressure of the Unspeakable, and the undeniable sense of the fundamental unjustness within our civilization, we must live in the tension of living under the current system and trying to enact a better one.
I’m reminded, with hope, of what adrienne marie brown says: what we pay attention to grows.
So pay attention to the kinds of cosmologies–the thoughtworlds–that offer an antidote to empire. Speak as if the world is inhabited by other-than-human agents, and we might come to actually see that it is full of ki and kin. Repay our indebtedness forward with a gift economy, and we might be able to leave behind more beauty than devastation. Simply living out these two practices would go far in repairing some of the worst of our current catastrophic civilization. In lieu of collapse, or perhaps until then, we can start practicing these things.
Tacitus, Agricola 29-32.
check out Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Civilizations for more on collapse dynamics.