I NTRODUCTION
J ohn Z erzan
J ohn Z erzan
S Ince the first edition of Against Civilization (1999) the general perspective Referred to by its title has begun to make sense to a growing number of people. An overall crisis - personal, social, environmental – is rapidly deepening, making such an indictment feasible, if not unavoidable.
This collection is, among other things, a reminder that critiques of ciilization itself are anything but new. And the past five years have provided an opportunity to add voices to the chorus of doubters, those with enough vision to think outside civilizational confines.
The 15 additional selections include correctives to a serious deficiency of the original book: the paucity of women and indigenous contributors (not exclusive categories, of course).
The current edition makes some advance in these vital areas, I believe.
Discontent with civilization has been with us all along, but is coming on now with a new freshness and insistence, as if it were a new thing. To assail civilization itself would be scandalous, but for the conclusion, occurring to more and more people, that it may be civilization that is the fundamental scandal.
I wont dwell here on the fact of the accelerating destruction of the biosphere. And perhaps equally obvious is the mutilation of „human nature“, along with outer nature. Freud decided that the fullness of civilization would bring, concomitantly, the zenith of universal neurosis. In this he was evidently a bit sanguine, too mild in his prognosis.
It is impossible to scan a newspaper and miss the malignancy of daily life. See the multiple homicides, the 600-percent increase in teen suicide over the past 30 years; count the ways to be heavily drugged against reality; ponder what is behind the movement away from literacy. One could go on almost endlessly charting the boredom, depresion, immiseration.
The concept of progress has been in trouble for a few decades, but the general crisis is deepening now at a quickening pace. From this palpable extremity it is clear that something is profoundly wrong. How far back did this virus originate? How much must change for us to turn away from the cultural death march we are on?
At the same time, there are some who cling to the ideal of civilization, as to a promise yet to be fulfilled. Norbert Elias, for example, declared that “civilization is never finished and always endangered.” More persuasive is the sobering view of what civilization has already wrought, as in today’s deadening and deadly convergence of technological processes and mass society. Richard Rubenstein found that the Holocaust “bears witness to the advance of civilization,” a chilling point further developed by Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman argued that history’s most gruesome moment so far was made possible by the inner logic of civilization, which is, at bottom, division of labor. This division of labor, or specialization, works to dissolve moral accountability as it contributes to technical achievement in this case, to the efficient, industrialized murder of millions.
But isn’t this too grim a picture to account for all of it? What of other aspects, like art, music, literature -are they not also the fruit of civilization? To return to Bauman and his point about Nazi genocide, Germany was after all the land of Goethe and Beethoven, arguably the most cultural or spiritual European country. Of course we try to draw strength from beautiful achievements, which often offer cultural criticism as well as aesthetic uplift. Does the presence of these pleasures and consolations make an indictment of the whole less unavoidable?
Speaking of unfulfilled ideals, however, it is valid to point out that civilization is indeed “never finished and always endangered.” And that is because civilization has always been imposed, and necessitates continual conquest and repression. Marx and Freud, among others, agreed on the incompatibility of humans and nature, which is to say, the necessity of triumph over nature, or work.
Obviously related is Kenneth Boulding’s judgment that the achievements of civilization “have been paid for at a very high cost in human degradation, suffering, inequality, and dominance.”
There hasn’t been unanimity as to civilization’s most salient characteristic. For Morgan it was writing; for Engels, state power; for Childe, the rise of cities. Renfrew nominated insulation from nature as most fundamental. But domestication stands behind all these manifestations, and not just the taming of animals and plants, but also the taming of human instincts and freedoms. Mastery, in various forms, has defined civilization and gauged human achievement. To name, to number, to time, to represent symbolic culture is that array of masteries upon which all subsequent hierarchies and confinements rest.
Civilization is also separation from an original wholeness and grace. The poor thing we call our “human nature” was not our first nature; it is a pathological condition. All the consolations and compensations and prosthetics of an ever more technicized and barren world do not make up for the emptiness. As Hilzheimer and others came to view domestications of animals as juvenilizations, so also are we made increasingly dependent and infantilized by the progress of civilization. Little wonder that myths, legends, and folklore about gardens of Eden, Golden Ages, Elysian fields, lands of Cockaigne, and other primitivist paradises are a worldwide phenomenon. This universal longing for an aboriginal, unalienated state has also had its dark flip side, a remarkable continuity of apocalyptic beliefs and prophets of doom - two sides of the same coin of a deep unhappiness with civilization.
Centuries of the persistence of utopias in the literature and politics of the West have more recently been replaced by a strong dystopian current, as hope seems to be giving way to nightmare apprehensions. This shift began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when virtually every major figure-e.g., Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Melville, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Dostoevski-expressed doubt about the vitality and future of culture. At the time that technology was becoming a worldwide unifying force, social scientists such as Durkheim and Masaryk noted that melancholy and suicide increased precisely with the forward movement of civilization.
In terms of the current intellectual domestication, postmodernism, despite a certain rhetoric of rebellion, is merely the latest extension of the modern civilizing process. For its moral cowardice as well as its zero degree of content, a horrific present is thus captured all too well. Meanwhile, Forbes magazine’s seventy-fifth-anniversary cover story explored “Why We Feel So Bad When We Have It So Good,” and the simple graffito “I can’t breathe!” captures our contemporary reality with precision.
From every camp, voices counsel that there can be no turning back from the path of progress, the unfolding of still more high-tech consumerist desolation. How hollow they sound, as we consider what has been lost and what may yet, one desperately hopes, be recovered.
This collection is, among other things, a reminder that critiques of ciilization itself are anything but new. And the past five years have provided an opportunity to add voices to the chorus of doubters, those with enough vision to think outside civilizational confines.
The 15 additional selections include correctives to a serious deficiency of the original book: the paucity of women and indigenous contributors (not exclusive categories, of course).
The current edition makes some advance in these vital areas, I believe.
Discontent with civilization has been with us all along, but is coming on now with a new freshness and insistence, as if it were a new thing. To assail civilization itself would be scandalous, but for the conclusion, occurring to more and more people, that it may be civilization that is the fundamental scandal.
I wont dwell here on the fact of the accelerating destruction of the biosphere. And perhaps equally obvious is the mutilation of „human nature“, along with outer nature. Freud decided that the fullness of civilization would bring, concomitantly, the zenith of universal neurosis. In this he was evidently a bit sanguine, too mild in his prognosis.
It is impossible to scan a newspaper and miss the malignancy of daily life. See the multiple homicides, the 600-percent increase in teen suicide over the past 30 years; count the ways to be heavily drugged against reality; ponder what is behind the movement away from literacy. One could go on almost endlessly charting the boredom, depresion, immiseration.
The concept of progress has been in trouble for a few decades, but the general crisis is deepening now at a quickening pace. From this palpable extremity it is clear that something is profoundly wrong. How far back did this virus originate? How much must change for us to turn away from the cultural death march we are on?
At the same time, there are some who cling to the ideal of civilization, as to a promise yet to be fulfilled. Norbert Elias, for example, declared that “civilization is never finished and always endangered.” More persuasive is the sobering view of what civilization has already wrought, as in today’s deadening and deadly convergence of technological processes and mass society. Richard Rubenstein found that the Holocaust “bears witness to the advance of civilization,” a chilling point further developed by Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman argued that history’s most gruesome moment so far was made possible by the inner logic of civilization, which is, at bottom, division of labor. This division of labor, or specialization, works to dissolve moral accountability as it contributes to technical achievement in this case, to the efficient, industrialized murder of millions.
But isn’t this too grim a picture to account for all of it? What of other aspects, like art, music, literature -are they not also the fruit of civilization? To return to Bauman and his point about Nazi genocide, Germany was after all the land of Goethe and Beethoven, arguably the most cultural or spiritual European country. Of course we try to draw strength from beautiful achievements, which often offer cultural criticism as well as aesthetic uplift. Does the presence of these pleasures and consolations make an indictment of the whole less unavoidable?
Speaking of unfulfilled ideals, however, it is valid to point out that civilization is indeed “never finished and always endangered.” And that is because civilization has always been imposed, and necessitates continual conquest and repression. Marx and Freud, among others, agreed on the incompatibility of humans and nature, which is to say, the necessity of triumph over nature, or work.
Obviously related is Kenneth Boulding’s judgment that the achievements of civilization “have been paid for at a very high cost in human degradation, suffering, inequality, and dominance.”
There hasn’t been unanimity as to civilization’s most salient characteristic. For Morgan it was writing; for Engels, state power; for Childe, the rise of cities. Renfrew nominated insulation from nature as most fundamental. But domestication stands behind all these manifestations, and not just the taming of animals and plants, but also the taming of human instincts and freedoms. Mastery, in various forms, has defined civilization and gauged human achievement. To name, to number, to time, to represent symbolic culture is that array of masteries upon which all subsequent hierarchies and confinements rest.
Civilization is also separation from an original wholeness and grace. The poor thing we call our “human nature” was not our first nature; it is a pathological condition. All the consolations and compensations and prosthetics of an ever more technicized and barren world do not make up for the emptiness. As Hilzheimer and others came to view domestications of animals as juvenilizations, so also are we made increasingly dependent and infantilized by the progress of civilization. Little wonder that myths, legends, and folklore about gardens of Eden, Golden Ages, Elysian fields, lands of Cockaigne, and other primitivist paradises are a worldwide phenomenon. This universal longing for an aboriginal, unalienated state has also had its dark flip side, a remarkable continuity of apocalyptic beliefs and prophets of doom - two sides of the same coin of a deep unhappiness with civilization.
Centuries of the persistence of utopias in the literature and politics of the West have more recently been replaced by a strong dystopian current, as hope seems to be giving way to nightmare apprehensions. This shift began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when virtually every major figure-e.g., Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Melville, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Dostoevski-expressed doubt about the vitality and future of culture. At the time that technology was becoming a worldwide unifying force, social scientists such as Durkheim and Masaryk noted that melancholy and suicide increased precisely with the forward movement of civilization.
In terms of the current intellectual domestication, postmodernism, despite a certain rhetoric of rebellion, is merely the latest extension of the modern civilizing process. For its moral cowardice as well as its zero degree of content, a horrific present is thus captured all too well. Meanwhile, Forbes magazine’s seventy-fifth-anniversary cover story explored “Why We Feel So Bad When We Have It So Good,” and the simple graffito “I can’t breathe!” captures our contemporary reality with precision.
From every camp, voices counsel that there can be no turning back from the path of progress, the unfolding of still more high-tech consumerist desolation. How hollow they sound, as we consider what has been lost and what may yet, one desperately hopes, be recovered.
OJ VOD
J ohn Z erzan
J ohn Z erzan
O d first edition books against civilization (1999) began to give a general view already alluded to in the title of the book sense the growing number of people. Global crisis - personal, social, environmental - is rapidly deepening, where such charges possible or even necessary.
This collection, among other things, is a reminder that the critique of civilization itself is not a new thing. A recent five years provided an opportunity to deliver voice chorus of skeptics, those with enough vision to think outside the constraints of civilization.
15 additional selections include repairs to a serious shortage of the original book: the lack of women and indigenous contributors (of course not as exclusive categories).
I believe that the current edition of the little progress in these essential areas.
discontent with civilization was here with us all the time, but now appears with a new freshness and insistence, as if it were a new matter. Criticize civilization would seem scandalous, but eventually, as there is more and more people is that it can be a civilization that is the major scandal.
will not address the fact there is still more rapid destruction of the biosphere. And perhaps equally obvious is the mutilation of "human nature" together with the mutilation of external nature. Freud concludes that the fullness of civilization will concomitantly with each peak of the universal neurosis. This was obviously a bit optimistic, too modest in his predictions.
It is impossible to skim through newspapers and overlook malignancy of daily life. Note the multiple murders, 600 percent increase in the number of suicides of minors over the past 30 years, count the ways it can be heavily drugged from reality, consider what is behind the movement beyond literacy. Could would continue almost indefinitely recording boredom, depression, misery.
Idea development of recent decades has problems, but the general deepening crisis is now accelerating pace. This is of obvious extreme, it is clear that there is something deeply wrong. Where and when is the origin of this virus? How much it has changed for us, that we have departed from this mortal progress, which now are we going?
same time, there are those who firmly adhere to the ideal of civilization as a promise which is yet to be completed. For example, Norbert Elias stated that "civilization is never completed and always endangered." Convincing a serious look at what she could give rise to civilization as we see in today's stultifying and deadly convergence of the technological process and mass society. Richard Rubenstein found that Holocaust "suggests the development of civilization", menacing the fact that further elaborated on Zygmunt Bauman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman argued that so far most abhorrent moment in history was provided by internal the logic of civilization, which is the basis of division of labor. This division of labor, or specialization, working for the abolition of moral responsibility, which in this case contributes to the technological success, an efficient, industrial murder of millions.
But it's not too terrible images that give only the responsibility? What other aspects such as art, music, literature - whether they are also the fruit of civilization? So I went back to Bauman and his view on the Nazi genocide, Germany was still the country of Goethe and Beethoven, probably cultural or spiritually most advanced European country. Of course, we try to pull power from the magnificent achievements, which often offer cultural criticism as well as the aesthetic uplift. Makes the presence of pleasure and comfort to charge a whole less necessary?
Speaking of blank ideals, however, is eligible to note that civilization really "is never completed and always endangered. And therefore, that civilization has always been forced on and requires constant dobívanie and repression. Marx and Freud, among others, agreed on the incompatibility of people and nature, which refers to the need to triumph over nature, or work.
is clearly related judgments Kenneth Boulding, that the achievements of civilization, "we paid a very high price of human degradation, misery, inequality and nadvádou."
On The most characteristic of civilization is not a unanimous view. For Morgan it was writing, for Engels state power; for Child boarding places. Renfrew nominated separation from nature as most important. But domestication underlying all these manifestations, not only tame animals and plants, but also repression of human instincts and freedoms. The government, in various forms, define civilization and human achievement assessed. Pomenuvávať, numbered, tail, represent symbolic culture is set by governments and controls, which rely on hierarchy and other restrictions.
Civilization is also separate from the original integrity and charm. The poor thing we now call our "human nature" was not our first naturalness, it's pathological condition. All the comfort and compensation and prostheses always more desolate world and the price we know to fill the void. How Hilzheimer and others saw as zmladzovanie domesticated animals, so are we more dependent and infantilized development of civilization.
It is no wonder that the myths, legends and folklore of the heavenly gardens, Golden Ages, Elysiánskych fields, and other countries Cockaigne primitivist havens are a global phenomenon. This general desire for Indigenous, neodcudzenom state should also reversed its dark side, an interesting link apocalyptic visions and prophets cessation - two sides of same coin deep dissatisfaction with civilization.
endurance century utopias in literature and politics west, recently exchanged grim schools of thought when it seems that hope gives way to a bad premonition. The break began seriously stand out in the nineteenth century, when virtually every major figure - eg., Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Melville, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Dostoevsky - Expressed doubt about the vitality and future of culture. At a time when the technology became a worldwide joining the force, noted social scientists like Durkheim and Masaryk, the melancholy and suicide increase the precision of the procedure of civilization.
Regarding the current intellectual domestication, postmodernism, despite a rhetoric of rebellion, so it is only the latest extension of the modern civilizing process. For its moral cowardice as well as its zero quantity of content is so well captured too severe present. Meanwhile, the leading article of Forbes magazine to its 75 anniversary studied "Why do we feel so bad when we are so good," graffiti and simple "I can not breathe!" Captures our current reality with precision.
from each camp Votes advise that the reverse path of development, more and more development of the consumer stiesnenosti is not possible. How to read empty when we consider what has been lost, and what still may be, someone might desperately dúfať, znovu nadobudnuté.
This collection, among other things, is a reminder that the critique of civilization itself is not a new thing. A recent five years provided an opportunity to deliver voice chorus of skeptics, those with enough vision to think outside the constraints of civilization.
15 additional selections include repairs to a serious shortage of the original book: the lack of women and indigenous contributors (of course not as exclusive categories).
I believe that the current edition of the little progress in these essential areas.
discontent with civilization was here with us all the time, but now appears with a new freshness and insistence, as if it were a new matter. Criticize civilization would seem scandalous, but eventually, as there is more and more people is that it can be a civilization that is the major scandal.
will not address the fact there is still more rapid destruction of the biosphere. And perhaps equally obvious is the mutilation of "human nature" together with the mutilation of external nature. Freud concludes that the fullness of civilization will concomitantly with each peak of the universal neurosis. This was obviously a bit optimistic, too modest in his predictions.
It is impossible to skim through newspapers and overlook malignancy of daily life. Note the multiple murders, 600 percent increase in the number of suicides of minors over the past 30 years, count the ways it can be heavily drugged from reality, consider what is behind the movement beyond literacy. Could would continue almost indefinitely recording boredom, depression, misery.
Idea development of recent decades has problems, but the general deepening crisis is now accelerating pace. This is of obvious extreme, it is clear that there is something deeply wrong. Where and when is the origin of this virus? How much it has changed for us, that we have departed from this mortal progress, which now are we going?
same time, there are those who firmly adhere to the ideal of civilization as a promise which is yet to be completed. For example, Norbert Elias stated that "civilization is never completed and always endangered." Convincing a serious look at what she could give rise to civilization as we see in today's stultifying and deadly convergence of the technological process and mass society. Richard Rubenstein found that Holocaust "suggests the development of civilization", menacing the fact that further elaborated on Zygmunt Bauman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman argued that so far most abhorrent moment in history was provided by internal the logic of civilization, which is the basis of division of labor. This division of labor, or specialization, working for the abolition of moral responsibility, which in this case contributes to the technological success, an efficient, industrial murder of millions.
But it's not too terrible images that give only the responsibility? What other aspects such as art, music, literature - whether they are also the fruit of civilization? So I went back to Bauman and his view on the Nazi genocide, Germany was still the country of Goethe and Beethoven, probably cultural or spiritually most advanced European country. Of course, we try to pull power from the magnificent achievements, which often offer cultural criticism as well as the aesthetic uplift. Makes the presence of pleasure and comfort to charge a whole less necessary?
Speaking of blank ideals, however, is eligible to note that civilization really "is never completed and always endangered. And therefore, that civilization has always been forced on and requires constant dobívanie and repression. Marx and Freud, among others, agreed on the incompatibility of people and nature, which refers to the need to triumph over nature, or work.
is clearly related judgments Kenneth Boulding, that the achievements of civilization, "we paid a very high price of human degradation, misery, inequality and nadvádou."
On The most characteristic of civilization is not a unanimous view. For Morgan it was writing, for Engels state power; for Child boarding places. Renfrew nominated separation from nature as most important. But domestication underlying all these manifestations, not only tame animals and plants, but also repression of human instincts and freedoms. The government, in various forms, define civilization and human achievement assessed. Pomenuvávať, numbered, tail, represent symbolic culture is set by governments and controls, which rely on hierarchy and other restrictions.
Civilization is also separate from the original integrity and charm. The poor thing we now call our "human nature" was not our first naturalness, it's pathological condition. All the comfort and compensation and prostheses always more desolate world and the price we know to fill the void. How Hilzheimer and others saw as zmladzovanie domesticated animals, so are we more dependent and infantilized development of civilization.
It is no wonder that the myths, legends and folklore of the heavenly gardens, Golden Ages, Elysiánskych fields, and other countries Cockaigne primitivist havens are a global phenomenon. This general desire for Indigenous, neodcudzenom state should also reversed its dark side, an interesting link apocalyptic visions and prophets cessation - two sides of same coin deep dissatisfaction with civilization.
endurance century utopias in literature and politics west, recently exchanged grim schools of thought when it seems that hope gives way to a bad premonition. The break began seriously stand out in the nineteenth century, when virtually every major figure - eg., Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Melville, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Dostoevsky - Expressed doubt about the vitality and future of culture. At a time when the technology became a worldwide joining the force, noted social scientists like Durkheim and Masaryk, the melancholy and suicide increase the precision of the procedure of civilization.
Regarding the current intellectual domestication, postmodernism, despite a rhetoric of rebellion, so it is only the latest extension of the modern civilizing process. For its moral cowardice as well as its zero quantity of content is so well captured too severe present. Meanwhile, the leading article of Forbes magazine to its 75 anniversary studied "Why do we feel so bad when we are so good," graffiti and simple "I can not breathe!" Captures our current reality with precision.
from each camp Votes advise that the reverse path of development, more and more development of the consumer stiesnenosti is not possible. How to read empty when we consider what has been lost, and what still may be, someone might desperately dúfať, znovu nadobudnuté.
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