Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy.
My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I googled his name and one of the first links was to a post where, back in 2004, Dirty Greek posted an interview Derrick Jensen from the Ecologist (March 2004). It was supposed to be a simply Q&A with five best book recommendations by Jensen, an author himself. The answers he gave are revealing.
Question one: Which book first made you realise that something was wrong (with the planet/political system/economic system, etc)?
My answer: It wasn’t a book. It was the destruction of place after place that I loved. And it was the complete insanity of a culture where so many people work at jobs they hate: What does it mean when the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing things they’d rather not do? The culture itself convinced me something was wrong, by being so extraordinarily destructive, of human happiness, and far more importantly, the world itself.
That said, Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien was the first book I read that let me know I was not insane: that the culture is insane. It was the first book I read that did not take the dominant culture’s utilitarian worldview as a given.
Uh huh. The culture is insane. Which culture, Derrick? Every culture has exploited the earth, at some point, and learned to live with the results. Yes, this is not cool. No, we are not the first and only.
Yes, I agree that it sucks that people have to do stuff they don’t like to do, or want to do, all day long. However, not all of us are bestselling authors who can charge $100/hour for webcam chats, or $60 a year for a subscription to our works in progress, or $18 for a t-shirt with a quote from our books. And no, I’m not saying he’s getting rich off his books and T-shirts and webcam-speaking gigs. I’m saying that most people don’t have many options. You want to wipe out evironmental trashing? Wipe out poverty first, and you’ll have masses both free and able to join the bigger fight.
Question two: Which one book would you give to every politician?
Answer: One that explodes.
Before you freak out, let’s change the question and see what you think: Which one book would you give to Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels?
Let’s ask this another way: Would a book have changed Hitler? I don’t think so. Unless it exploded.
And before you freak out at the comparison of modern politicians to Hitler and his gang, try to look at it from the perspective of wild salmon, grizzly bears, bluefin tuna, or any of the (fiscally) poor or indigenous human beings. Those in power now are more destructive than anyone has ever been. And they are for the most part psychologically unreachable. And if someone does reach some politician, that politician will no longer be in power.
I recently shared a stage with Ward Chuchill. He said the primary difference between the U.S. and the Nazis is that the U.S. didn’t lose.
I responded with one word: “Yet.”
Because that’s the primary difference.
Except that this kind of talk is what drives the people in the middle over to the right. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Jensen’s passionate roleplaying as an extremist surely does sell books, but it does not help spread his message. The extremism rocks the converted, turns them into passionate consumers of his writing, but it does nothing to change the culture. That’s the secret paradox of the role Jensen plays — most people will never, ever trust him or someone like him.
But the converted, they’re going to be great consumers.
He’s right, most books won’t change the politicians — but not because they’re like Hitler. Most books — maybe no books — will change politicians because politicians are humans, and books will never change most human beings.
Jensen’s books don’t change people either, not beyond the small niche of people who are looking to be changed and seek out books like his. And his lack of faith, while it is surprisingly realistic, doesn’t line up with the little niche of book-publishing, public speaking, and so on that he’s created for himself.
Question three: What book would you give to every CEO?
Answer: See above.
Exploding books. So there’s a real consistency here. And a real, palpable hopelessness.
Question four: What book would you give to every child?
Answer: I wouldn’t give them a book.
Oh, wow! I expected another exploding book! Maybe Jensen doesn’t hate humanity… or, no, wait, a more sensible explanation is that advocating violent death for children will put his consumer base off, and he cannot afford to do so.
Of course, if he had his way, most of those children would die. After all, he’s the guy who advocates the termination of civilization. He seriously wants to get rid of it, or says he does. Only someone who lives in America — hell, in California — could miss the larger implications of such a desire.
If you do away with civilization, and thereby do away with all the technologies that facilitate modern agriculture and aquaculture and the infrastructure that moves things like food and clothing and fuel around, how will people eat? How will they stay warm in winter? It’s one thing for Derrick to do okay out, Thoreau-like, in the woods in a cabin for a while, as he describes in A Language Older Than Words. It’s quite another for everyone in the world to suddenly have to do so. The termination of civilization as we know it would result in a massive die-out of humanity, because of the simple fact that we’re dependent on our technologies to support the population we’re at right now.
All those dams Jensen hates so much — that he keeps advocating blowing up — are there to provide the electricity so you can read his webpage, and cook your food. They’re there to keep water in reserve so you have something to drink or wash your body and clothing in next week.
Are they perfect? Are they optimal? No, of course not. They can be massively improved. But should we just trash technology and civilization? Jensen that’s the message I take from Jensen’s writing: yes, we should. Perhaps he should get on a plane (or a boat, or a hot-air-balloon) and go visit someplace like Liberia, or Somalia. Places where the civilization he hates so much has already broken apart. Because what you get when you get rid of civilization is not some mythic, Rousseauian return to nature. What you get is roving bands of youths with guns, raping and killing and eating whatever they find, including some of those they rape and kill. What you get when civilization falls apart is chaos. Mass starvation. And an even more desperate, rapacious attitude toward nature.
Wouldn’t it be more merciful to give those kids exploding books than to advocate abandoning them to that hellscape?
Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words.
Says the bestselling author, I wish to note. I am glad I didn’t pay much for my used copies of those samples of his work that I own — with the exception of one book — because, hey, I was saving trees. Glad to have spared you the sin of making money off something you fundamentally oppose, Mr. Jensen.
I would take children outside, and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads.
How very California. What about if you’re in the desert? Nature for Jensen is California forests, or maybe the West Coast. Someone like him would not last 3 days on the outback without a guide. Why? Oh, yes — ecocide. All those dangerous, poisonous critters — all the dangerous, stomping megafauna? The evil, terrible humans used their civilization — er, wait, they were peace-loving, egalitarian naturalist Indians, right? They can’t have had a civilization, since, in Jensenist thought, civilization is based on violence. So why is there evidence that they caused the biggest of megafauna to go extinct in the Americas, just like humans seem to have done everywhere they’ve gone? Hey, maybe they were tainted by civilization after all.
My goodness. Maybe ecocide is bigger than we thought, Derrick. Maybe we have to abolish not just civilization, but humanity in general!
The scary thing is that in his radical-chic mode, I am not sure he wouldn’t agree with the abolition of humanity. Hell, he may have written of it somewhere already!
That said, if you’re going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind in the Willows, which would I hope remind them to go outside.
Oh, wow, another surprise. I would have thought he’d have produced a series of children’s books by now. Well, he must not have, because if he had, rest assured, he’d be flogging it here.
Question five: It’s 2050. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising. You’re only allowed one book on the Ark. What is it?
Answer: I wouldn’t take a book, and I wouldn’t get on the ark. I would kill myself (and take a dam out with me).
Quick Question #1: Does it seem apparent that blowing up a dam would achieve a bloody thing when the world is being flooded by endless rains?
(Yeah, I didn’t think so. Oh, right, it’s a masturbatory fantasy. It also shows Jensen’s lack of imagination. That dams will be a major problem in 2050 assumes we won’t have made strides in any number of technologies. Jensen’s assumption is right out of Orwell: the current status quo will perpetuate itself exactly, forever — a boot stamping on a human face, yadda yadda yadda.)
Quick Question #2: Okay, then I’ll save your spot on the ark for my girlfriend, alright? Thanks Derrick.
I do not want to live without a living landbase. Without a living landbase I would already be dead.
Yet, paradoxically, you wouldn’t be, because dead men cannot kill themselves. So you’d miss the chance to tell your children how the world used to be. You’d miss the chance to seal up old issues of Nature in an airtight container for generations to come. (Which puts me in mind of Bruce Sterling’s short-short “Message Found in a Bottle” — in Visionary in Residence — a story that seemed bleak when I first read it. Wow, Derrick Jensen has succeeded in making it positively optimistic!) You’d miss out on seeing if maybe the waters subsided a decade later. You also missed how unscientific that question was: there would be a landbase, it’d just be smaller. There isn’t enough water on earth to submerge everything, after all.
No book would even remotely compensate. Not a million books. Not a million computers. Not a million people would compensate.
Not even six billion, or eight billion. Freedom, no matter what the cost. Gotcha, Derrick.
As for me, I’m on the side of life. I agree, we’re idiots when it comes to nature. We’re assholes.
But unlike Jensen, I haven’t given up on us. I have the guts to admit that while I love the natural world, we are part of that natural world, and, yes, humanity is the part I’m most concerned about keeping alive.
I also have the guts to trust in science and technology, and not just in the newagey ramblings and subjective impressions of a bestselling nature author, ramblings the logic behind which is so shaky that I only pray Jensen himself doesn’t take them anywhere near as seriously as he appears to do. But, of course he doesn’t. If he did, he’d be advocating we all trashed our computers, and he wouldnt’t have a web page, right? I mean, the amount of energy the Internet uses, alone, should be enough for him to be calling on idiots worldwide to crash the net.
Yes, I daresay he’s not quite as science-savvy as he makes himself out to be. In A Language Older Than Words, he explained that he’d trained as a scientist (a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines, says Wikipedia) and left the field in disgust. Yeah, well, I don’t know whether a BA in something counts that much for cred anymore: I graduated with a BA in Music and English Lit and when I arrived at grad school to study lit more, I was completely out to sea. I pulled myself to the banks, surely, but it was not because I had a BA in anything. Jensen’s cred as a scientist, it means very little, I think, in the big picture.
Still, who can blame him? The evironmentalist-extremist author niche was wide open, and everyone’s gotta make a living. He’s probably having fun. He might even have convinced himself to believe some of the silliness he spouts, in which case, there’s the effervescent endorphin high of self-righteous rage. But as for me, I will trust to other, more measured, and perhaps more mature, and definitely more hopeful minds to keep our world going.
Poor Jensen. There are many pits in his life. He rallies for radicalism but does not act and will not act. It’s unproductive illusion for sympathy and I bet he feels more like a man by saying it. His thinking will seem progressive for college youth but to adults his ideas are cheeky and useless. Especially since we are not all hating our lives as he wants to believe. He assumes all adults hate and think like him. Maybe students in late teens do. They will out grow him. We need to act environmentally. We have no choice. Americans are the consumers and he fails to realize that. The man is in pain, hate is his motive and adrenaline shot, he wants to inflict pain and spews it. But he helps uphold this civilization more than most. HE’S A SALESMAN. HE SELLS BOOKS. I doubt he does anything else. Illusion illusion illusion. Isn’t it written in Jensen’s bio that he is homosexual? So my guess is he has no children to pass anything on to. The fellow has nothing to lose and it shows. He has lost it all and will act like he hated it anyway so bring it all down with him? Senseless and sad. Poor Jensen.
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Alex
[comment redacted by blog owner for rude behaviour compounded by a lack of engagement with the discussion, ie. trolling]
Alex,
If you’re looking to comment here, I recommend you review the comments & site policy page. Whatever problems you see in my reasoning, you don’t explain or rebut: you just insult. I’m fine with disagreement and discussion. I’m not fine with people throwing around the word “idiot” without a moment’s effort to rebut an argument.
If primitivism is so important to you, and if you’re so convinced that my and others’ arguments are in error, explain why. We’re reasonable people, we’ll listen and discuss. (When we have time: I’m traveling now so it’ll be a little more than a week till I have adequate time to really reply to any sort of involved comment.) But I refuse to post insulting comments written by people who really can’t be bothered to explain why they disagree with someone.
And if you can’t handle that–and it seems a fair number of primitivists can’t seem to do so, or can’t be bothered–then perhaps that speaks poorly for your ideology. I mean, you do want to convince people that it’s a sensible one, don’t you?
Fressia,
Well, I still have some time for his thoughts on education — I think “adults” and bureacrats, who pretend more than anyone to be “grown up” but aren’t, have ruined “learning” with useless packaging.
As for the remainder of his thoughts, um, I’m on a terrible computer in Laos, so I’ll have to get back to you on the rest, except to say that I think it’s unfair to slam him over his sexuality. Plenty of homosexuals (and other people without kids) are intelligent and serious about these problems. I am, and I have no kids. Bringing up whether he’s gay or not seems like a cheap shot, which (to go with the boxing analogy) is funny since there’s so much more you can do with punches above the belt. The guy’s more than half-loony, but it’s got nothing to do with whether he likes men or women.
But yes, illusion, salesman, and creative writing teacher. We may not be as happy as we could be, but I don’t think abandoning civilization is the way to make us happier. i’m here in Laos, where people live as Jensen would have us all live. People are happy, but poor; this might lead some to think that people would be happier poorer. But I can tell you, meeting someone whose sister died at age 17 of tuberculosis (like the Nepali guy I met in India) suggests that Jensen has it all figured out.
I’ll always only half-remember that passage he wrote about the only reason he wasn’t out blowing up dams is because he is writing — that if he weren’t, he’d be blowing things up. It never read quite honestly. Not that I think he is rich off writing — but he may be doing very well of his cottage industry of eco-rage. Much better off financially than he would be blowing up dams (and sitting in jail).
Not that I call him a hypocrite for not blowing up dams — certainly not. But the choice is a false dichotomy. It reads more like Tori Amos’s sadness, which never rang as true as Elliot Smith’s or Sylvia Plath’s. I’ll consider myself proven wrong when Jensen takes radical action on something, or Amos drowns herself. (But I’m not holding my breath.)
How interesting you would see that bit on sexuality a pop-shot! I am too and I don’t have children. Statistical facts most homo’s don’t have children. The pits in Jensen’s work come from not being able to take a stand but promoting one that isn’t feasible and going on and on about it all. Poor chap. I feel bad for the lad for putting himself out there. Most people around the world would like to see American’s take on a new lifestyle. But his methods are silly considering he will not do anything more than uphold his own American ways; otherwise he too would be in Laos or somewhere more remote and unplugged. In other words, he does not walk the talk. He just talks so he has no proof of his ideas or results. Other than it won’t be pretty because it isn’t now. Unless he is just beyond any of us in his thinking.
I’m reading Jensen more closely now. I know exactly what he is saying. I saw a documentary on the History channel, Jensen *IS* before his time. What he proposes is scary, even for him I’m sure. But he’s right, he’s bright, he’s prophetic, he’s completely completely right now matter how brazen it sounds. He’s so right on it’s amazing. He’s doing good. I need to buy his other Endgame and read everything he has published. Are you piggy-backing off his notoriety to get your own publicity off his acclimades? I barely surfaced his stuff I needed to find out what all the hallaballouh was about. NOW I KNOW. I was wrong and you should re-read him too. You’ll be happy and be a fan too!
You make some good points.
but I think you should re-read Jensen with those points in mind. I know I will.
all of the criticisms you’ve brought up he’s answered. whether he answers them sufficiently to convince you, I don’t know. but he’s addressed them. maybe you should go back and read them again.
for instance, the criticism that he encourages consumption and resource mis-use as an author. he explicitly says, time and again, that he would rather be part of a healthy, living world than an author. he’s a good propagandist and the earth needs a propagandist to stop the ecocide. him not writing a book and selling it won’t stop clear cutting and me not reading his books off the internet won’t stop the destruction of our planet. think of it this way: if you have a huge wound on your leg, you need to sew it shut. granted, puncturing your flesh is going to hurt you. but it has to be done to stop the bleeding/facilitate the healing. Jensen is that needle and thread. actually, imagine if your leg hadn’t been tended to and had gone rancid, you’ll need to amputate. Jensen is that knife, cutting off the leg to save the rest of the body.
your claim that our culture isn’t insane — that every other culture is/was ecocidal — is off-base. i think you should re-examine what ecocidal means. other cultures, yes, all cultures, have to learn to not exploit their land bases. but the difference between global industrial civilization and every successful culture, is that we aren’t learning. Jensen keeps trying to teach us, but we aren’t learning. it doesn’t look like we’re going to voluntarily stop destroying the planet. we aren’t catching on.
your point that Jensen’s extremism isn’t working, I think, ignores the reality of social change and revolution. social change doesn’t happen when 51% of the people want change. it doesn’t even happen when 51% of the ruling class wants change. it happens when something makes it happen.
revolution usually doesn’t come from consensus.
Jensen is only converting the few who want to be converted while he drives many more to the “right.” Jensen knows this and doesn’t see it as a fault. he doesn’t want to change everyone’s mind: he wants to change just enough minds to get the revolution going. a critical mass, if you will.
nonetheless, these criticisms are very valuable. thank you for them.
Fressia,
Apologies, I didn’t see your comment until now. Yeah, no, read Jensen again. He’s not before his time, he’s way behind the present. His deepest assumption — that technology is static, and that we cannot develop anything sustainable and need to go back to pre-industrialized levels of technology — is just wrong. And sadly but blatantly hairshirt besides.
Justin,
Yeah, his responses to those criticisms — they don’t satisfy me.
Actually, my point about resource consumption and resource misuse is perhaps somewhat idle: I’m a writer too. But you know, if Jensen really wanted his message to reach as many people as possible, wouldn’t he be following the example of someone like Cory Doctorow? Doctorow generates huge amounts of free content and spins it all off onto the web. (And makes a handy living at it, too.) Anyone and everyone can access it for free, remix most of it freely if they attribute it to him… and, yes, buy a copy if and when they have money and if they like it — because for Doctorow, getting his name (and his message on copyright, DRM, and privacy issues) out is more valuable than making money off every instance where someone consumes his work.. (Let alone charging exhorbitant fees to webcast appearances at seminars or whatever, as Jensen was offering to do.) It’s funny that a pro-SF author who’s in it at least in good part to make a living is so much more generous with his goods (which anyone can sample without consuming any paper or glue, by the way) compared to the so-called “radical” Jensen who gives absolutely nothing away. Who’s the radical again?
Regarding insanity, I actually think all cultures are insane. I live in an insane culture that is not my own, and remember leaving my own (also insane) culture to live there. But Jensen has fetishized the insanity of global post-industrial culture to the point where everything else is excluded, including the fact that we’re generally more well-equipped to see our own insanity. Don’t think for a minute we’re less aware of our impact on the environment than most societies before us. We’re way more aware than other societies before us, simply because we have the science to tell us. Republicans may disagree, but anyone with a modicum of education is beyond that stupidity.
The mythology of the noble, eco-friendly savage that Jensen implicitly promotes through images of the salmon flooding the rivers and so on is a lie, and a profoundly revisionist take on history. (If you visit my hometown, you can see where native people ran the Buffalo off cliffs dozens at a time. The only difference with the white man was technological efficiency. Bad, yes, but not different in kind, just in effectiveness.)
You have an interesting point about “revolution” but I’m afraid I don’t buy Jensen is really pushing for that… or indeed pushing for a revolution that can and will happen. At bottom, Jensen’s solution inherently necessitates the death of most of humanity. I don’t mean Nazi-scale genocide — I mean the death of billions of people, and the suffering and starvation of several billion more. Are people starving now? Yes. As many as would be in Jensen’s ideal future? No way in hell. Those salmon Jensen loves so much would be extinct in three days, as humanity clung to life post-collapse. Because what would happen if you collapsed global industrial civilization is that a mass human die-out would follow. It’s the elephant in the room of Jensen’s “visionary” revolution. Do we need a more robust system? Yes. Do we need to collapse everything to get there? No, that’s just a teenager’s desire to “f*ck sh*t up” expressed in pseudo-intelligent ranting.
At best he’s rousing up people to react in the most hazardous, retrogressive way possible. A much saner vision forward involves rehabilitation of global industrial society, since, more than anyone else before us, we have all the tools necessary to do it: to live at a much higher standard than anyone in history, while also being less toxic to the planet and ourselves. We’re just pulling up over the hump of the hill, and Jensen is shouting that we need to go back down. A good book for a saner vision of what we can do is Worldchanging, though you can also check out the blog for free.
I do appreciate your comments, though!
thanks for the reply. i’m not sure why Jensen is such a fascist with his work — and why he doesn’t more freely distribute it.
it does make more sense to give it out for free, like Doctorow.
i thought it was just me who found his fanatical (and very capitalistic) control issues a bit, you know, inconsistent with his greater philosophy. it really detracts from his overall message when he’s changing 80 bucks an hour to teleconference. kinda lame, actually. and that “book club” of his…
the whole thing is scheisty.
as for your other points: you use the conditional form when talking about civilization’s collapse. i don’t think it’s a possibility; it’s a certainty. it’s going to happen, and people are going to die. Jensen just wants to see it happen sooner — so there are fewer people to die miserably and over-exploit the planet when the crash does happen.
the oil will run out and i don’t think there is a way around that. (unless nuclear power can be produced in a truly safe and non-polluting way, which, government and industry assurances aside, hasn’t happened yet). but even if we could find a way around the energy problem, the fault is built into the core values of this culture. eventually it will fail.
but you know, i think that’s the basic disagreement with you and Jensen (and I). you hit right on it when you said that “His deepest assumption … is just wrong.”
Jensen (and I) think things were just fine before agriculture and internal combustion engines and strip mining; these things make life worse, not better.
where we have the Myth of the Noble Savage in the Golden Age (which anthropological research shows isn’t a myth at all and actually exists in so-called underdeveloped societies), the rest of the “modern” world has the Myth of Progress, heralding a techno-utopian future (which has never existed and might never come into being).
Exactly: Jensen’s revolution will not be televised, it will be provided on DVDs and iTunes downloadables DRMed to the teeth, NOT freely distributable, because that’s how to make more money off it. At the cost of getting his message out. Ironic, since the exact people who can afford his nice big (pricey) trade paperback books are the same ones who have the biggest (short- and long-term) stake in opposing his views, and also the least likely to join up in his revolution.
And I haven’t actually heard anyone calling him out on it, at least not in public. I do have to wonder how he would answer to the charge that he’s in it for the cash. Methinks he protests too much in saying he’d rather not be an author. If you can write books and give speeches for a living, it’s a pretty nice way to live.
To the degree that civilizations cannot last forever, and that humanity as a species will have a finite lifespan — it eventually will have to, given what we know of physics, as energy in the universe has to run out sometime — then sure, and end will come. But I think it’s still a bit early to be putting on hairshirts and whipping ourselves over ecological original sin. Because I don’t think it’s too late to sort our way out if we do put our minds to it (and our money to it) now.
Well, there are people who claim to have designed bacteria that can synthesize crude oil from random biomatter. That’s something. And we’re getting better at pulling oil out of places where it used not to be economical. And the movement to conserve energy is gaining strength.
See, this is my problem with Jensen, too. Nobody — nobody — foresaw the microchip, not what it would do. Look at the work of people trying to imagine the future — the people most strenuously trying to do it, ie. futurists and SF authors of the past — and you see stories where engineers are using slide rules inside interstellar spaceships. The number of technologies and possible workarounds that are appearing now are pretty hard to keep up with. I don’t think Jensen’s answer is the one we should go with; if things are bound to collapse even if we try, why not try, do our best, and deal with it if it happens. It’s like getting a (bad) infection in your toe, and cutting off both legs in order to avoid eventual death from septicemia. I hardly think Jensen would be lining up to be one of those to die for the ending of civilization, and I doubt he’s be willing to give up modern comforts for it, even.
Which is why I don’t think anyone else in their right mind would give up those things if they could be had — or mostly had — in a clean, safe, and green way.
Well, I think a few hours back in those days of agriculture courtesy of a time machine would cure Jensen (and anyone else) of that idea. Since time machines don’t exist, the wonderfully-written and deeply-researched novel by Connie Willis titled The Doomsday Book is probably one of the better remedies available.
We’re talking about a world lit only by fire. A world where appendicitis means death, where a broken leg can mean death, where childbirth all to often meant death. No dental care, superstition dominating medical care, hypocritical theocrats (all to reminiscent of Jensen, indeed) hogging all the available goodies, and people feeling utterly cold all winter long. Got asthma? Die. Got the flu? Die. What are these black sores in your armpits? Die. Acne? You’re a leper, get the hell out of town. Run out of food? Die.
People who talk about the myth of progress need to come to Asia and travel a bit. Go someplace like Laos or Burma, where there are no hospitals and you take your life in your hands by boarding a bus. Visit Korea and look at pictures of people’s faces 20 and 30 years ago, the dirt poor children who are now affluent and thank heaven they’re not still living in mud huts and starving from March to May every year.
(I say this knowing you’re in Korea, at least, it seems so from your blog; I’m not trying to be rude, mind, just saying the counterargument is in the heads of all the people over 40 or 50 that you meet here. Maybe you should ask some of those older people you know whether life was better back when Korea was so poor that Ethiopia was sending aid here, or now. I’m sure you’ll hear some pretty blunt responses.)
Which is not a defense of strip mining and cars: I’d be happy to get rid of both, or at least to cut way back on both. But that’s bathwater, and I value the baby we’ve been washing in it.
Well, I already feel like we’re in a utopian future now – just the cusp of one, and it’s tentative and all that, but man, we live better than anyone has ever lived. I mean even many of the poorer people in the developed world — and many of the middle class in the developing world — live better than Medieval peasants did.
And I don’t know of this anthropological research you speak of, but I do know Jared Diamond has written about a number of societies who crashed themselves; it has to do with dumb resource management and growth. Technology always factors into both, and tech is changing faster than every before… and with such interest in these pressing problems — also greater than ever before — maybe things will sort themselves out.
I don’t disagree it’s right to be worried. But Jensen’s hairshirt brigade is, essentially, a death cult. And like with most death cults, a profitable one, at that.
the high price of Jensen’s books/DVDs/comics/t-shirts might not be prohibitive to spreading his message. just as rich folks have the most reason not to act, they also have the most leverage once they do act. Jensen’s real big on that concept. leverage. revolution takes a few people, well placed and with the right power. not saying Jensen is only speaking to the rich, but that might be an effect of his pricing scheme. he might also have major qualms with the “free product” model. ie, the product is never free: (evil) corporations make money off the product. Jensen might not like his product being used to make money for (evil) corporations.
as for technological advances saving the day: i don’t think the problem is technology. i think it’s our use of technology. one factory farm; one Buick; one clear cut won’t bring ecological disaster. but 4 billion people using these things and to such reckless ends? the problem lies with our core values and how we see the world. in this instance, it’s the idea that the world is ours to use as we see fit. that the living world is just raw material for our creations. that’s the essential problem of our society.
finally, when i talk about the Golden Age, i don’t mean a misstep of civilization, a temporary failure of food rationing. that’s what Korea in the 50’s and 60’s was and most third world countries are. it wasn’t free, natural people living free lives in harmony with their land base. the opposite, actually. the same is true of any culture with the flu or asthma and almost any other sickness. most sicknesses, including the ones you mentioned, are sicknesses of civilization and an unhealthy relationship with nature. the flu comes/came from unwise and inhumane animal husbandry. asthma comes from profligate environmental pollution. leprosy comes from living in close quarters with infected people. painful childbirth (and dental problems) comes from poor nutrition — a diet heavy in grains, a hallmark of civilization. civilization doesn’t just alleviate these diseases and unfortunate fates; civilization causes them.
temporary failure of civilization shouldn’t be presented as the Golden Age. i’d say the Golden Age could more properly be seen among pre-contact Native Hawaiians, the !Kung, indigenous Australians, pre-contact Patagons, and pretty much every ecologically harmonious people the western world has managed to wipe out and mischaracterize.
which reminds me of one of Jensen’s major peeves: the Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis being used to vilify all of humanity and justify the modern world’s rampant destruction. Jensen devoted ten or twenty pages in “Endgame: Volume II” (pretentious, anyone?) to debunking that idea. for me, it’s laughable that this theory wasn’t founded on forensic evidence but rather computer models.
Justin,
Yeah, if Jensen (a) wanted his message out as widely as possible and (b) didn’t want anyone to make money on it, he could release it under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/No-Derivs license. The fear of companies making money off it is horseshit, obviously, as he hasn’t done so, and has instead decided to use traditional, message-bottlenecking (not to mention lucrative) modes of transmission.
(And I have to wonder how any Evil Company could make money off a Jensen book or video if it were released online for free. It seems like a nonsense explanation at best.)
In other words, products can indeed be as free as humanly possible — all but for the cost of a download and the energy to power your PC to read it on — and you can get PCs with a windup crank if you really like. But if it’s free, you can make money on it, and I suspect that’s Jensen’s real objection.
(And hey, a guy’s gotta make a living. But it also suggests maybe we should all stop pretending we can separate the “evil” corporations from the cirtuous radicals, and see whether we can’t rehabilitate the whole system so we can coexist in a healthy, sensible, green way. Hence my interest in a constructive form of change of the sort Worldchanging promotes. After all, the world’s a big, huge, complex system and we’re deeply interwoven into it. I don’t wanna die just because Jensen can’t imagine any non-destructive solution: do you?)
Revolution is also something that has never really gone well, while we’re dredging up unhelpful approaches to things. Mostly, revolutions end up replicating the same stupid systems, but with the reins in the hands of different people. I’m thinking of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist revolution… none of those were particularly kind to flesh-and-blood human beings, nor did they actually pursue any of the rhetorically-impressive goals set out for them. If Jensen is indeed enamored of violent revolution, I’d like him to show us a counterexample that has worked wonders on a civilization-scale system. I certainly wouldn’t want the reins in the hands of anyone who takes Jensen seriously! (No offense. I also wouldn’t want the reins in the hands of most SF writers, and I am one myself.)
As for technological advances: I agree that lots of our uses of technology have often been stupid. The idiocy of cars is a no-brained to anyone over 12 who grew up at any remove from a society in which they are equated with identity and individuality. People are beginning to catch on to that, too. Slowly. Maybe too slowly. But unlike Jensen’s smash-it-up anarch-rock revolution, switching to green power feels good, and is good for you. It can be made sexy. It can be made to work, without dismantling everything. Changes, we can handle. If someone demands that we abandon everything and go back to the bush, people will ignore them, but cycling to work? Living closer to work? Telecommuting? Living in slightly better-designed homes made for people living in a world with a climate? Yes, we can do that. If it can be made practicable, people will go for it. We can make it the new chic, the new gotta-have-it. All that is possible, because we may be lazy, but we’re not as completely stupid and hopeless as some would have us think. A kind of consumer-jujitsu can make us use consumer culture to build a greener world.
Because whether our uses of tech to date have been wise, doesn’t mean all tech is bad. Tech is problematic, of course. Clive Ponting has noted that every new energy takes more energy to get at. Tech might mitigate that. Maybe we need to light our homes less, and sleep earlier. But we certainly shouldn’t throw all tech out just because some of our uses have been dumb. The bottom line is that the Hairshirt-Green brigade want us to abandon tech for a different reason: it doesn’t fit their aesthetic of how we should live. It’s a religious conviction at base, and silly. Baby, bathwater. They’re different!
By the way, the flu was not originally caused by “poor animal husbandry” — even if superflus are partly caused by it, and even if cruel animal husbandry is unarguably evil; asthma is not caused by pollution — though pollution exacerbates it; and painful childbirth is absolutely not caused by diet. This kind of pseudoscientific explanation is precisely why so many refuse to take green radicals seriously. Even a little research reveals all of those are false. Especially the childbirth one: the biggest part of any newborn infant is its head. It’s our oversized infant brains — which are radically disproportionate to our bodies compared with other mammals — that make childbirth such a huge risk, and thus it has been since ever we were human. (An excess to which I think most humans are, rather fortunately, attached.) That’s why cats and dogs can birth whole litters while humans go one or two at a time (in most cases).
How much of it is mischaracterization? I have some pretty interesting quotes from the writings of the first Westerners to meet native Australians. From what those writings describe, Australians lived short, hard, and often brutal lives. Which is absolutely no excuse for colonizing their lands and deracinating (or trying to deracinate) them. But let’s not glorify life in a neolithic-stage-tech society. It was no picnic by any stretch, and you and I would probably be dead within a year of it.
By the way:
Well, when you put it that way. Of course, I don’t know of any real scientists who make it their business to “vilify all of humanity and justify the modern world’s rampant destruction” — that sounds like imaginary phenomena concocted for the convenience of Jensenian histrionics. That is, real scientists as seen through Jensen’s funhouse-mirror glasses: scientists, after all, don’t “villify all of humanity,” they just look for and try to understand apparent patterns. Such as the pattern of megafauna extinctions seeming to spread at roughly (though not exactly) the same rate as humans.
And the idea that no forensic evidence has played into the theory that hunting extincted megafauna in the Pleistocene is, again, false — and ignores the fact that this is actually unresolved. There’s evidence for both climate and human activities playing a role. Hell, climate change probably played a role in human migration, too! That Jensen feels confident enough, from his cabin in the woods, to dismiss a whole line of explanation that the scientific community hasn’t dismissed speaks volumes for his religious zeal; unfortunately, religious zeal doesn’t always line up with reality.
(That is, if I have his argument right from your explanation.)
I also think the rejection of “computer modeling” as ridiculous is worth thinking about. Why is computer modeling so ridiculous? Computers are simply math engines, and math is the language of science. If you throw away computation, you throw away so much of modern science, including the stuff that actually works very well and which we understand better due t computer modeling. The real reason is, again, the fundamentalist green belief that tech is bad. Computers are bad? How come Jensen writes his books on one, and teleconferences via the evil internet? It’s a hypocritical anti-tech/anti-science position that, no matter how you shake or squeeze it, can’t really be resolved with the ways Jensen (and his fans) practice their particular environmentalism.
A great post on this kind of religiosity and how it makes no sense is here.
By the way, you might be shocked to read my recent story in Asimov’s SF, mentioned on the front page of this site. It’s about a lot of these issues, and shows I’m very sympathetic to the idea that environmental problems need sane, equitable solutions. I’m just not hip to the idea that dismantling our world in a sudden, cataclysmic revolution is the way to do it.
the “green platform” (if there can be such a thing) is not that technology is bad. rather, it’s that wise and judicial use of technology is better than profligate use and absolute faith in technology. more to the point, it’s that natural is usually better than artificial. it’s that improving on things is always good (we’ve got a brain for a reason) but not at the expense of what’s good already. in other words, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. greens want to redress the horrible things humanity has done to the world (and that often requires technology). but they also want to stop ruining the natural world any more. that’s why they (we?) always come off as such “Luddites.” we don’t despise technology, we just want much less of it and more time to think about using it — and most people tend to think more technology is usually better. we also know that no matter what technology we develop, it’s not going to solve things until the basic flaw of modern civilization is address. (the flaw, i think, is that humans don’t have a deep relation to the natural world and see it as raw materials.)
the incremental, reformist approach to our problems using more tech and development sounds good. it’s sexy and i can buy new stuff. but the problem is that it doesn’t address the essential problem with modern civilization (see above). it’s not that there is no sustainable technology, just that modern humans don’t tend to use them sustainably.
the rest is not really important, so feel free to just not read it.
to address factual concerns: i find it interesting that societies that didn’t live with their farm animals — that is, that didn’t keep them in their bedroom — and didn’t use factory farming, didn’t have flu pandemics. Native Hawaiians, even though they kept chickens and pigs, had no flu immunity when Captain Cook arrived. the same for Tahitians, Maori, Mayans (except for the pigs) and many other indigenous peoples. it’s also interesting to note that the only species of flu virus endemic to humans has an extremely low mutation rate; meaning, most humans are immune to that species. the flu everyone is so worried about — and which are responsible for the pandemics — come from animals. and not just any animals: inhumanly kept and slaughtered animals. the result of technology gone wrong.
as for childbirth: i should have said overly-painful and unduly dangerous childbirth. the problem with childbirth, as you pointed out, is the huge human head. this isn’t really a survival problem until malnourishment (i.e. grain rich diets) started stunting womens’ development. in other words, humans, given proper nutrition, don’t need hospitals to reproduce consistently.
if pollution doesn’t cause asthma, why is there a direct link between living near a freeway and increased chances of asthma? the same for living in a house with a smoker. why is asthma a disease of the developed (civilized) world and the parts of the developing world to which we externalize our costs? yes, pollution doesn’t, in the strictest sense, cause asthma. that’s the immune system’s doing. but what is the immune system reacting to?
finally, i’m not glorifying the neolithic society. nor would i glorify the paleolithic society. were i faced with that reality without proper preparation, i would probably be dead by next spring. but i will say that life wasn’t “nasty, brutish and short” as Hobbes put it — and how the modern world has maintained ever since. rather, it’s much nicer than most of us think.
Justin,
Yeah, I know what you mean about the “green platform” not being explicitly anti-tech — though some greens certainly are — but I’m talking about a significant underpinning of irrational anti-tech sentiment, one that tends toward absolutism about things like the natural/unnatural dichotomy (after all, if humans are part of nature, how is anything we do unnatural?), and about its distrust of technical solutions to the problems we face.
Which is unfortunate, because the worse things get, the more likely the only way through will be by smartly designed technologies.
For the record, I too distrust absolute faith in technology — or, indeed, in anything, including mother nature.
Right, but from your comments above, it looks like the party line of green rhetoric blames on technology or on “civilization” or even on agriculture, significant portions of what looks to me (and to mainstream science) like the human condition. In other words, we cannot agree not to fix what ain’t broke if greens are ardently claiming that childbirth hurts because of dietary problems (though you–sort of–retracted that), or asthma is caused by pollution (though you, sort-of, retracted that too). Those seeming arguments represent a kind of revisionist “It wasn’t broke before,” claim implicit to a certain wing of the green movement, one that is also often, deep down, religiously anti-tech. I doubt the righteous feelings would comfort the many women who’ve died in childbirth over the last million years, or those who died of asthma back in the middle ages, or those who would do so again if that wing of the green movement managed to force their hopes upon the rest of us.
Is that the basic flaw of the modern world, or the basic flaw of the human species, or is it the basic modus operandi of natural selection? This is an important question, as significant as, “Does my leg hurt because I walked too much, or does my leg hurt because there’s a tumor somewhere in it, or does my lef not hurt, just this is normal and I’m an out-of-shape bastard?”
And maybe it’s not a flaw: maybe it’s a trait that has served us extremely well in surviving the millennia so far, but has also become a challenge for us which we need to get a handle on if we’re to survive much longer?
Which is precisely what the majority of the world — in the developed and the developing world alike — seem to want. Or think they want. This being the path of least resistance, wouldn’t it be wise to try use that momentum in the interests of actual change, rather than fighting that momentum because…
… well, in my less charitable moments, I’d say, “fighting that momentum because it’s a great way to build one’s identity, and it makes us feel hip and cool and tragic and justifies our generalized rage and lost feelings as disconnected postmodern people” but I’m not trying to tar you with Jensen’s brush. There is, however, a strong gesture towards Thoreau and his resistance of the status quo. I’m just not sure that it can do much in the realistic sense. Not when so much momentum is going in a different direction.
Well, Jensen likes to allege that it’s just us. Which is a bit egocentric, if you ask me. (And Jared Diamond at least presents evidence that past societies have collapsed for similar reasons to what face us. But really, the main objection I have to this idea is that it makes modern people somehow special in a deep, core way. We’re not. We’re like our ancestors in most ways. There’s no reason to think that rapacity among human beings has suddenly become selected for and rapidly spread among humans. (And living in a society like Korea, which was agrarian not long ago, demonstrates that our apparent rapacity is largely a function of increased capability to consume — technical ability — and not the core instinct, which seems to be universal in humans.)
I’ll address the rest a bit later, I have a class now!
Well, but pandemics would be impossible without globalized travel, of course. Is the misuse of antibiotics a big part of the influenza pandemic threat right now? And is it fair to blame technology when it’s being, by the terms described in its usage guidelines misused?
Well, and they were separated from Eurasia, so yes, the diseases they had resistance to, and suffered from, differed in some ways. Since there’s a guy wallpapering the room my book on Native Australian history is in, I can’t check this, but I seem to recall that Australians pre-contact did suffer from a number of diseases familiar to Westerners, such as syphilis — a disease gotten from living in close proximity to animals, if I remember right. (I don’t know if Native Australians lived with any domesticated animals then, but you know, once a disease enters a human population, it very rarely disappears again.)
Well, resistant. Most of us still get sick from it sometimes. It still kills us sometimes, even. (Jim Henson, for example. Or little old ladies.)
Actually, a combination of factors including, yes, technology misused. Western agritech is a nightmare in some ways, but non-Western (ie. mis-) uses of Western agritech can be even more horrifying.
I’m sorry but I’m very dubious about that claim. Anything to back it up — besides Jensen, who, after all, rejects science all too quickly for my tastes?
I would add that, yeah, we don’t need hospitals to have humans reproduce consistently. Because in the scope of natural selection, it’s not necessarily important that every birthing mother survive every birth. If only 50% of mothers consistently survive, they’ll reproduce more and pick up the slack, whilst spreading genes that increase their female offspring’s chances of surviving giving birth. So, in the numbers game of evolution, you’re right.
Once you start factoring in an understandable desire for women to survive childbirth, then everything changes.
One could just as easily ask, “If hierarchic thinking isn’t genetic, why are Koreans overall so much more predisposed to it?” Hierarchic thinking is inherent in humans as a species — for reasons obvious if we look at other primates — but this symptom gets exacerbated in certain circumstances. Living by a highway will exacerbate asthma, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cause it. I have read that it can be correlated to things like childhood exposure to certain pollutants, but also to things like dust allergies, or even mild food allergies that develop and recede in early childhood.
To say that living near a highway causes asthma is to simplify so radically that one might as well throw scientific method out the window.
By the way, I’m asthmatic, and my asthma developed while I was living in areas so free from pollution that one couldn’t really hope for better. (Northern Saskatchewan, to be precise.) My father had been a smoker when I was very small, but it’s not clear what role that had. Natural irritants — such as the yellow dust from China — seem to affect my asthma quite severely, while others — like the horrendous smog of Delhi — seemed not to affect me as much as I expected, when I was there one winter.
Well, it could be that the survival rates in those areas are higher for asthmatics, because of relatively more care available. It could be that more children are born, and thus more people with unusually sensitive immune systems are living in places where more irritants affect them.
As I noted, that question can spiral in on itself and raise the other question, “Why are so many more people exhibiting sensitive immune systems now?” Which might relate to pollution — the thought has crossed my mind — but might also have something to do with the fact people with asthma simply aren’t dying as children at the rate they probably did a thousand years ago.
It depends where you’re living, of course. I have a friend moving to Guadeloupe this month which, save the issue of oceans rising over time (and possible desertification), sounds like a wonderful place to spend a post-apocalyptic life to me, as long as one has some land to farm on, and weapons to hold off possible invaders from other nearby islands. But in Korea, say, or in Canada? Forget about it. It’s a very big wheel we’d have to reinvent. I’m sure some would. There’s a wonderful story I read long ago by Stephen Baxter that describes such a world — humans living pretty much as they did aeons ago, but sometime far in our future. It was vivid enough for me to know the road there would be hard, long, and painful. Why Jensen seems to want to send us down it without the comforts of sustainable high technology — which, after all, can be developed, even if they haven’t been yet — is beyond me.
these are all very good points you make. and they make very logical sense. and were i to address all of them with the respect and research they deserve, i’d be here all day — but i’ve got to clean my apartment and pair down all of my posessions to three bags. (i’m moving back to hawaii!)
so here’s the essential bit that characterizes Derrick Jensen’s work (as far as I can see) and the rest of the ecologically minded set:
life is more important than not-life. notice i didn’t say death or dead because death is just another form of life. i said “not-life;” the negation of life. for Greens, for Jensen, for me, for probably every well-adjusted non-pathalogical culture in history; life has been the most important thing.
that is not true for our culture. our culture values ideas and making the world fit an idea. that is why Jensen calls it sick.
all of your points are good. but, and this is what i would think important, go back and think about them from the view that life is the most important thing. not ideas; not profit; not standards of living; not development. but life. that spark that makes all this possible. call it the Tao; call it the soul; call it whatever you want. but keep that in mind when you think about these issues. and that thing, life, is not the same as ideology.
it seems to me that 1) you are missing Jensen’s entire point and 2) Jensen’s stances on things baffle you because you don’t keep this in mind. Like, you say: “Why Jensen seems to want to send us down it without the comforts of sustainable high technology — which, after all, can be developed, even if they haven’t been yet — is beyond me.”
I think you’ll understand more of Jensen if you just remember what the most important thing in the world is (to Jensen): life. Not just my life; your life; Jensen’s life. but all life. that’s what Jensen is thinking about. and not numbers or ideas. but life. salmon, trout, oysters, prarrie grasses, red woods, arctic lichen, monkies, korean children and yes, even you and i.
i think it comes down to how we view the world. here’s a good essay discussing that. “Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary Person.” i couldn’t find a complete one online, but i think you could. you’re far better at this computer game than i am.
Justin,
Mmm. Well, and it’s very correct to point out that life in all its diversity should be a higher priority in, say, the circles of business or government.
But I think we need to be careful not to buy into the rhetoric that those who disagree with Jensen don’t value “life” as much as he does. It’s like saying to people who don’t share one’s religious convictions,
“Ah, well, you just don’t understand.” It’s very possible to understand and share some convictions, and disagree about the implications.
So, personally, I don’t think I’m missing Jensen’s point. I’m getting it, I just think there’s too much fantasy, too much anti-science, and too much carelessness about the implications of his solution — as well as a very offputting profiteering aspect — for me to really take him seriously.
Anyway, you’re too busy to continue this, so I’ll just thank you for the discussion and add that I hope your move goes well and you enjoy Hawaii!
PS: The book you mention? I don’t think there are any copies online for free. It’s avaulable in monograph form, though. Maybe if I’m somewhere with libraries sometimes, I may look at it.
yes. thank you, too. it was a good discussion. what a good discussion ought to be. i look forward to reading more of your blog and your fiction.
and i’ll try to find you an essay that outlines the Planetary Person paradigm online. but basically, it’s not that life is the higher priority. it’s that life is the only priority.
Okay. Let’s just “hope” that industrial civilization stops killing the natural world before we reach critical tipping points. Do the motherfucking math, shitheads. It’s looking too late for that already. Self-reinforcing feedback loops now in operation. Assholes.
Enjoy eating your babies.
Medium,
Thank you for exemplifying exactly why people who’re into Jensen aren;’t worth trying to have a discussion with. If it’s not peurile expressions of rage (“Do the motherfucking math, shitheads… Assholes”) or fetishistic dystopianism (“It’s looking too late for that already… Enjoy eating your babies.”) then it’s dollops of pseudoscience thrown in as if authoritatively. “The math”? “Self-reinforcing feedback loops”? “Critical tipping points”?
And I’m someone who actually agrees with you that the world is in ecological crisis, that massive change is needed now and that even so things are very dire, and maybe too late, that businesses and governments have a LOT to answer for, and that modern industrial societies do somewhat resemble whole addict swarms.
If you’re alienating me just because I dare to question Pope Jensen — because it seems to me your dichotomy is either join the Church of Jensen, or “just hope” things will get better — then how the hell are you going to reach the hearts and minds of people who doubt what we already agree on? The people who will be alienated by the fear Jensen tries to use to manipulate them into buying his books and media? The people who know enough science to be dubious about his claims of scientific street cred? The people who will see him, correctly, as either a poseur or dangerously unbalanced?
Which is precisely why the fantasy of bridge-bombing looms so large in Jensen’s rhetoric: because he’s done so much to ensure he and his followers cannot be taken seriously by normal, sane, regular people that the only possible recourse is as extremist and destructive as those he criticizes. Ironic, that shadowy mirroring of those he fashions his enemies, right there in his own fantasies. And, I presume, yours.
Not that there’s any point in discussing this with you, I know…
Friends and I here in the land that engenders Jensen and the likes of Kuczinsky have been discussing why we have so many anti-technology cranks and posers. The three main answers that keep coming up are
1) people who can’t live and work well with others migrate to extreme rurality
2) mental illness expressing itself in delusions of grandeur–and the sufferers more able to eke out a living here
3) survivors of child abuse with concommitant trust issues, anger, and revenge fantasies.
I do find it rich that Jensen and his followers seem to follow their anti-tech religion by living in cities, having electricity, computers, websites, presumably wearing clothes, and eating food that does not consist of raw meat of mastodons.
It’s a racket; embarrassing to find that anyone with any education at all follows their ideas.
Elliot,
Very interesting observations. Two of the three points on your list also apply to a certain subset of expatriates who are, for example, teaching English in Asia.
And it’s perceptive of you to link the trust issues and revenge fantasies. This probably explains some of the appeal of Jensen’s ragey talk, and rather defiant (but ineffectual) walk.
And yeah, I remember one of my exes having to read Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred, which is a sort of proto-Jensen text, and me wondering (when I picked it up one night and read it) whether he’d written it on a computer, while being fed by this evil civilization he was raging against.
“Racket” is an excellent word. But at the same time, I figure I’m educated, and I found it, briefly, seductive, if still somewhat wrong in a way that took a little while to figure out that just because I agreed about some things didn’t mean Jensen wasn’t nuts.
To gordsellar, Elliot, and others:
I, personally, am an anarcho-primitivist; my coming to this school of thought began with reading Jensen, but was strengthened through studies of anthropology, and reflections on my own experiences in wilderness. I am attending currently attending college- I understand that at first, this seems to be too hypocritical to look past. I do use computers, occasionally drive a car, eat most of my food from stores, etc. It is important to keep in mind that anti-civilization theory is simply a critique; it does not prescribe any necessary course of action. I spend as much time as possible in the wilderness, constantly working towards a more self-sustaining lifestyle– others do much more, many do much less.
To respond to your three theories as to how people as myself become so “misguided,” I can personally say that none describe me. I love my family and friends dearly, and have been described by many as outgoing and caring. I do what I do because I love wilderness and all life, not just because I hate civilization; this hatred is engendered by civilization’s destructive actions towards all life. It is embarrassing to you that “anyone with any education at all follows their ideas?” I am well-educated, and find that my thinking is very similar to Jensen’s. I found that he was expressing sentiments I have always felt– this is very different than following. I do not agree with Jensen on everything, but very much appreciate what he is doing. I do not know any anarcho-primitivists, green anarchists, neo-luddites, etc. who do not have excellent and well thought out reasons for their beliefs.
Green Rage,
Well, I think talking about Jensen’s self-contradictions as I did is valid, but also maybe a diversion from the real issue, which is that the guy’s rhetoric seems designed to appeal to a very dysfunctional, irrational subset of People Who Give a Damn, while alienating the vast majority of that group.
The question to ask yourself is: why do I eat food from stores, drive a car, work on computers? It’s because you couldn’t live as well (or even at all, in the case of the food) without doing so.
If “anti-civilization theory” is a critique and it doesn’t need to be tested again, or applied to, the world then it’s useless: it’s like all the other “critiques” that people use to work out their rage and dysthymia and daddy issues, a diversion that eats all their energy while making the world no better.
The point is: sustainable lifestyles and civilization aren’t incompatible, if we try to be creative about how we retool civilization, something we’re going to have to do in the near future… and are in fact now beginning to do. If we fail, millions on millions die — something Jensen seems to accept as, well, I’m not sure he even sees it as relevant or problematic. If we ignore his gleeful doom-fetishism and succeed in retooling civilization to be more responsible, clean, and sane, billions can benefit and the ecosphere will flourish.
In other words: civilization is a mess, but why not rehabilitate it for the sake of billions of human lives, instead of killing it in a frenzy of rage and vengeance?
As I said, I was briefly impressed with something in Jensen, too — though I think it was more my own personal blind spots and “issues” that his rhetoric appealed to. What I find sad is people who devote themselves to something so doctrinaire and so outright nutball, yet seem to think it’s the beacon of sanity.
I have never met a single anarcho-primitivists, green anarchists, neo-luddites, etc. who did not think he or she had excellent and well thought out reasons for his or her beliefs. But often in reality he or she was also dismissive of other approaches to the problems concerning him or her, doctrinaire about how this or that radical solution was “the only way,” and unable to respond to questions like, “So how do you justify the massive loss of human life that would come from the application of this theory in practice?”
gordsellar,
“The question to ask yourself is: why do I eat food from stores, drive a car, work on computers? It’s because you couldn’t live as well (or even at all, in the case of the food) without doing so.”
This is largely true today– I find this fact lamentable, and it is part of what I’m struggling against.
“If ‘anti-civilization theory’ is a critique and it doesn’t need to be tested again, or applied to, the world then it’s useless”
I never said it shouldn’t be tested, and certainly I never said it shouldn’t be put into practice. There’s no set prescription to follow– some write, some learn and teach primitive skills, some engage in illegal actions, etc.
“The point is: sustainable lifestyles and civilization aren’t incompatible”
This simply isn’t true. Civilization is based on what anthropologists sometimes refer to as “social complexity,” arising only after the the adoption of harmful practices such as agriculture. Jared Diamond’s essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” is a great introduction to the problems of agriculture (it’s very likely that you’ve read it before, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll find it very well researched and much more facually based than work such as Jensen’s).
“In other words: civilization is a mess, but why not rehabilitate it for the sake of billions of human lives, instead of killing it in a frenzy of rage and vengeance?”
I personally believe that, like all other civilizations, modern industrial civilization will collapse. The sooner it does, the sooner the Earth begins to heal. With the possibilities of food shortages (such as the fairly recent ones in a few third world nations), the coming oil collapse, economic collapse, and the ecological collapse which would destroy much more than the others– ecological collapse has the potential for destroying all life.
I do not believe that my way is the “only way,” simply the best that I have found. If one’s primary focus lies in anything other than wilderness, this way will not make sense for them. I have carefully considered what I believe to be most important, and these are the conclusions I have come to.
“So how do you justify the massive loss of human life that would come from the application of this theory in practice?”
I do believe that if civilization continues, it is bound (as always) to collapse. The longer the collapse is put off, the more people there are, and the less wilderness is left. The longer civilization lasts, the more people will die or suffer in its final gasp, and the little bits of wilderness left will continue to be destroyed, making the transition into a sustainable and healthy way of living much more difficult.
Green Rage,
By engaging in them like everyone else? I’m sorry, but nobody is *forcing* you to eat grocery store food, work a job, surf the net, or light your home with electricity. You are perfectly able to abandon all that and become a nomadic wanderer in the bush.
The fact that you don’t suggests that your commitment Derrick Jensen’s critique is as suspect as the commitment of most people who claim to believe wacky things. (If Christians were really committed to Christian teachings, you would be able to pick them out of a crowd with no trouble. As Kierkegaard pointed out, Christians are rare in Christendom. I suspect that there are very few people who truly are committed to Jensen’s teachings who are in a position to consume his books. This paradox is central to the paradox of his whole career. In other words, his career depends on the failure of his writings to convince people of his ostensible beliefs.)
On the non-application of “anticivilization critique”:
I’ll quote back what you originally wrote:
“this seems to be too hypocritical to look past. I do use computers, occasionally drive a car, eat most of my food from stores, etc. It is important to keep in mind that anti-civilization theory is simply a critique; it does not prescribe any necessary course of action.”
Which, in the context of a discussion about hypocrisy in Jensen’s work/life, reads as if you’re saying one needn’t necessarily do anything whilst being a devotee of “anti-civilization critique.”
Which strikes a wrong note to me. I’ve met lots of people who are anti-civilization except for, well, every detail of their lives. And I think this crowd makes up a large proportion of Jensen’s readership.
But as you say you spend lots of time in the bush, trying to be independent of civilization, I do wonder: what’s stopping you from making the plunge? What keeps you in the civilization game?
Is it fear of dying from something as simple and fixable (in a modern society) as a broken leg or a bad flu? Is it that every meal needn’t be a life-or-death struggle? Is it the wonderful technology that allows you and me to dispute this here?
On the compatibility of civilization and sustainability, I’ll grant you that the way we’re doing it at the moment isn’t. I will not grant you, on faith alone, that a sustainable civilization cannot be grown out of this one, nor will I grant you that our particular civilization need proceed in the same way each one has before it.
Do civilizations collapse? Yes. Would I bet ours escaping this fate if we don’t changes things in a big way, immediately? No. But does that mean sustainable and green civilizations are impossible? Ha, only someone whose imagination has curdled would assert such a thing. It’s unknown, but seemingly unprecedented things happen. Humans, after all, developed language at some point: an (on earth) unprecedented development. Humans developed agriculture. Unprecedented.
It is no less than a failure of the imagination, and doctrinaire devotionalism, to claim that all civilizations must collapse.
And while the whole of your society is busily telling you that you have a right to your beliefs, I am going to go so far as to say nobody is entitled to a belief for which there is no evidence. A generalization of the quality you advance is precisely the sort of belief I feel no need to acknowledge because it’s just belief.
Aha, so you really are prone to wanting collapse because you think it will be good for the earth.
Hey, you’re right. To hell with the billions who’ll have to die. If it’s good for the earth, we can give ’em up, right?
And by the way, there are all kinds of things that could destroy all life on earth than we cannot do anything about if we abandon modern technological civilization. Stuff that Jensen’s never thought about.
Or do you think we can map with the naked, unconnected eye all the various giant objects speeding around our solar system, prone to collide with the earth at some random moment?
What about the development of some horribly virulent disease that, say, affects all mammals? (I don’t know if you’re prone to thinking those would be human-made, but nature’s not nearly so benevolent as Jensen suggests. Nature is a bitchy mother sometimes.) Or what about some mass extinction event that, yes, we can’t do much about now, but maybe someday could fend off? Our only hope in those cases — the only hope for all known life — would be something technological, something dependent on “civilization.”
The fantasy wish of returning to Eden is, well, just that: a fantasy. There is no idyllic Eden. Just more brutal universe, as far as we can see.
I just wanted to add to this, late in the game. I was recently banned from Mr. Jensen’s website because I challenged their ‘morals’. This guy is looking like a cult more and more to me. I am aghast at how cultish the whole thing is. For instance, check out these ‘mandatory’ questions they ask before joining the forum. I have NEVER been to a forum with so much quelling of dissent:
“Please tell us a little about yourself, and answer the following mandatory questions:
1) Why do you want to join this forum? What do you hope to gain? What do you wish to contribute?
2) Have you read the Forum FAQ, the Forum Netiquette, and Derrick’s Endgame Premises & Purpose of the Forum?
3) Do you agree to accept the Endgame Premises as the forum’s foundation and as your starting point for discussion here?
4) Which books of Derrick’s have you read, and how were you first exposed to his work?
5) What do you think about what Lierre Keith says in this quote? “The task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems.”
6) Anything else we should know about you initially or that you want to share? Books/Media to recommend? Projects you are working on?
7) Tell us about your vision of how you want to help bring down civilization or describe which side of this war you are on.”
Amazing. These people are crazy. Add that to the fact that anyone serious about bringing civilization down would never post about it on a forum online. I think Derrick works for the CIA or FBI. This is just amazing.
Wow. It’s a bit depressing, really, that people could stay attracted to that for any great length of time. Ah well, it’s a living, I suppose, for Mr. Jensen.
Yeah I hate primitivism too… Even though the number of adherents is small I still feel like it is taking up too much space in public discourse. But I do think that it would be better to focus on its theoretical and practical problems primarily rather than the hypocrisies of its adherents, Jensen included.
I do think it’s totally understandable to be wary of people who don’t practice what they preach. At the same time anyone who agrees that the system (or systems) is to blame for a significant chunk of what’s wrong in the world can’t help but be a hypocrite for existing within that system. To put it another way: we’ll never hear from Jensen’s intellectually and behaviorly consistent alter ego because that person doesn’t write books, have a website, etc. To harp on him about that is a distraction from primitivism’s much bigger problems. Problems like misanthropy, sloppy over generalizations, impracticality etc. (I know these have been touched on above.)
I also want to say that I get a little queasy when I see some thing like this, ostensibly arguing against primitivism:
“the worse things get, the more likely the only way through will be by smartly designed technologies.”
Invoking ‘smartly designed’ technologies in this way is a form of wishful thinking. We will not be able to overcome finite resources forever or the fact that, as you acknowledge else where, technology is the problem in many cases. (cars are one example.) My hope is that you didn’t mean it when you said “the only way.”
Personally I think that if there are ‘ways through’ it will through a diversity of approaches, most of them having more to do with social organization than swearing off *or* putting faith in technology in the abstract.
Last thing: let’s not get too hung up on whether a modern or primitive life is better. It really depends on who you ask and when. Certainly most (but not all) indigenous groups that have had their way of life threatened have resisted and rightly so. Presumably they preferred their lifestyle. And certainly (as Jensen acknowledges)the vast majority of people in industrial civilizations aren’t going to willingly become hunter gatherers either (him included). There are benefits and drawbacks to each one — my preference would be for the best of both where possible. I also think that a critical question (that is raised by Jensen too) is whether a way of life is sustainable and whether it rests on the exploitation of people and animals somewhere else. If this is the case then I think that the needs of the victims of exploitation need to take precedence over the needs of the beneficiaries of that exploitation. I’m just not so sure that ‘civilization’ itself necessarily, always and everywhere, creates these dilemmas. I’m more inclined to place the blame on colonialism, racism and speciesism.
jla,
I agree, primitivism or whatever we want to call this is taking up too much space, and also turning off people whose sympathies might otherwise fall in a healthier place. Theoretical discussions are fine for the bigger picture, I just think pointing out hypocrisy is useful when dealing with someone so popular and prachy as Jensen.
My point isn’t that Jensen is a hypocrite to want to tear things down; it’s that he is not really forthright when it comes to discussing the long-term consequences of his own solution, because those are basically unbearable consequences to any sane and moral creature.
Right, but I think the discussion of generalities may not catch enough people’s attention. Criticizing the pope of a radical movement may, at least, open some chinks in the armor.
I don’t know. I think that is a bit defeatist, really. We’re never going to complete master building optimal technologies, but given the kind of magic we’re going to have to pull if we’re going to sustain human life and nonhuman life on Earth for the next century, technology is going to be the linchpin as well as the fundament.
(Though, “only” might sound unreasonable: political, social, and economic changes are necessary too, after all. But without better technologies that access energy we’re not tapping into, and do it more cleanly than we think is possible now? We’re screwed. In other words, if technology doesn’t bloom green and smart with a quickness, then all the political, social, and economic change we can bring about still won’t save us.)
I agree there are ways through, of course — multiple ones. But I believe that each one will rely, most crucially, on a form of technology. They may compete, they may disenfranchise, but without them, I suspect (though I cannot prove) that we’re doomed already.
Hmm. It’s telling, though, that large numbers of people who are living in less-than-modern societies are dying to refashion their societies into modern ones.
I think the telling question is not whether we ask people from a “primitive” society what they want, or people from a modern one. I think the telling difference would be taking people who have intimate, long-term experience of both and asking which they would choose to raise their children in.
Yes, this is what I see as optimal, too… and as only beign feasible when the proper nexus of technologies necessary to make it possible and sustainable coexist with the right kinds of social, political, and other conditions.
Readings in sociobiology have convinced me that even those are not the source of such problems, but only manifestations of specific drives and instincts embedded by natural selection in human nature. Which is a sobering thought, but nonetheless hard for me to ignore or discard.
You folks say that primitivists are hypocrites for not living in the bush as nomad hunter-gatherers. Please show me where one can do this without being forced to buy land, pay property taxes, or hunt without paying license fees. I always hear this argument, but I don’t think people understand the pervasiveness of Civilization.
If you wish to continue trying to ‘green’ civilization, you will soon find out that requires that everyone come on board, that everyone quit trying to dominate each other. As long as the foundations of civilization are in place (domestication, agriculture, etc.) this will never happen. You will always have militarism, population explosions, and topsoil depletion. Jensen is a fringe anti-civilization author. He doesn’t really talk about the important anthropological stuff that is key in the anti-civ critique. Check out John Zerzan if you want to get a more accurate depiction of the anti-civ critique.
We get it that someone cannot completely go off the grid. In fact, I approve of that: I think detaching from society is a lazy, selfish approach to the problems. We’re all in this together, after all. And besides: the taxes and so on that you mention all help to pay for the roads that these dropouts will eventually use when they, say, need to go to a doctor.
By the way, I’m sure you could find places to drop out of the system if you truly wanted to: Northern Canada is a big, empty place. Even if the stories I’ve heard–about how someone can build a house on northern Crown Land for free, as long as there are no locks on the doors–are false, you could probably get away with it for a long, long time. Nobody wants to, though. All the anti-civ people seem to want to do anti-civ in the comfort of their own city or town or neighborhood. How convenient.
Realistically, “greening” civilization is our only hope, given all the things you point out: we will always have domestication & agriculture, war, militarism, population explosions, and topsoil issues. Of course, you and I understand this way better than most people even 100 years ago. Score 1 (well, more like many) point(s) for civilization. And greening civilization wouldn’t require everyone to come on board, any more than capitalism did. All it requires is that enough people and institutions do, that the world follows.
gordsellar,
You seem to subscribe to the deification of civilized humans. You seem to be okay with civilized humans using whatever means they can to prolong their lives. Even if the products of this endeavor are devastating to the natural world. As you said, “Flu: die” in your eyes this is cruel and unjust. But take a look at the natural world around us, do you see nonhumans manipulating nature to cheat death? Do you see them working in vivisection labs so they can develop medicines that only serve the desire of avoiding death? In my opinion Civilization is founded on the fear of death. That combined with (misguided) intelligence and the deification of civilized humans. As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. We attempt to feed the starving millions with genetically modified foods all the while the population never stops growing. At the same time we remove a species from the endangered list when we discover its population has risen to 500 or so. We actually think it normal that our population is over 7 billion. Yes I am saying that part of the answer is to “let” (as if we are responsible for all the people of the world- once again: Deification) people die from the flu, and whatever other natural deaths may occur. You may think that is something Hitler might do but it’s not, it is simply letting nature run its course, letting nature maintain population- taking control out of our hands. I am not saying we cannot use medicines, but when the development of those meds require vivisection labs, mass production in factories, and so on, it is clear that we are then waging war on the natural process of death and therefore causing more pain and suffering in the world. It’s just not worth it.
Yes, Jensen is himself a hypocrite (as he acknowledged many times). Because he’s a capitalist, but this misses the point. In order to live in this system we must all be capitalists and if your good at what you do you will inevitably get money for that. So he asks for money to read something he has not yet sent to print. But you never ask what he does with that money. From what I know he does take care of himself and his disease along with taking care of his mother. What else does he do with his money that he has earned from doing what he loves? I don’t know and neither do you. You can speculate that he’s buying stock or whatever your jealous perspective of him wants to conjure up. From my discussions with Derrick I’m sure most of his money goes towards supporting organizations that have similar politics. He also helps to publish books in which he agrees with their message. Why don’t you focus this energy you have on those who en$lave us?
But he speaks at great length about all the “Hypocrite Arguments” in Endgame, in which I have a feeling you didn’t even read.
Yes there are a few things that I noticed Derrick has missed (or maybe avoided) talking about in Endgame. Derrick is also human. But I do not think I could have done a better job then Endgame myself. There are now and have always been tyrants, slaves, religious genocide, and so on, but if we no longer have a planet to live on we will have no place to have these silly arguments. Although his human logic is not perfect it has brought to light things that need to be discussed in public, and no matter how much faith you have in technology it will, if not continue to enslave us, then it will always require more exploitation and always depend on the view that humans are above all nonhumans and the deciders of fate. If not this then it will always be used for controlling whatever it can- and the goal is to control everything, leaving nothing up to the natural processes of evolution- and what long-term effects will this have on the natural world?
This brings me to science. Because of it we are able to understand things like evolution, but then comes along the human desire to overthrow evolution (quest for immortality, modify genetics) and the belief that we can do better then it because we know better. Most scientists act as though they love evolution and then they turn around and use their knowledge of it to control it rather then trust it- once again, because we are gods.
If everyone just fully accepted death and saw death as the important part of life that it is then there would be no need for books like Endgame. End the war on mortality, it’s not a fight worth fighting. But we’re not going to, that’s (one reason) why we need to bring down civilization. But we’re not even going to do that.
One more thing. Are YOU giving out your non-published work for free? Maybe you don’t feel your work is that important… then why are you doing it? Send me some free shit… You know what happens when people give away their work for free? No one takes it seriously.
Actually Derrick will write you back a free response. I’ve emailed him many times and some of his emails have been very long.
But here’s Derrick in his own words:
“You’re right, I do have to make a living. And I support my disabled (functionally blind) mother. And I have two major incurable diseases, and up until a year ago I had no insurance. Medical bills were 15K in one year. Try paying that when you made 16K by doing talks. This argument of being in it for the money is not only insulting, it’s also really fucking stupid and ignorant. First, it shows they know NOTHING about how publishing works. I make almost no money from my books. Nobody does unless you’re Stephen King. Industry standard for royalties is authors get 7.5 percent of cover price (presuming you can get the publisher to pay you, and also subtracting 10 percent for my agent, who is worth every penny and more). When I write a book with a co-author, that means I get a whopping 3.75 percent of cover price. That’s 75 cents on a 20 dollar book. Further, my first degree was in science, from the Colorado School of Mines. My classmates started in 1983 at 35K/year. By 1988, at which point I was making about 5K (nothing from writing) they were making 70K. By 1995, at which point I made a whopping 5K from writing (for that year only) my classmates were in mid-level management for oil companies making 200K/year. From 1995 through 2002 I made a total of about 5 or 10K TOTAL for those years through writing. By 2002 I would have been mid to upper level management, making 500K/year. By now I’d be making in the millions or even tens of millions per year as upper management of an oil company. And I’ve yet to make as much in 2009 dollars in a year as I would have made in 1983 in 1983 dollars: I’ve never come within sniffing distance of 30K/year.”
“It’s also really petty, and it’s fucking bullshit on another level. Who the fuck are they to care if I did make a million dollars (which I didn’t)? Honestly, I have no idea how much Terry Tempest Williams makes per talk, but I hope it’s a lot, because she deserves to be rewarded for her work. Same with other writers whose work I admire. I would LOVE it if Aric McBay made a million dollars on his writing, or if Lierre Keith made a million dollars, or if Stephanie McMillan made a million dollars on her writing. I would be SO happy for them. I’m not so petty, small-minded, envious, to wish poverty on those whose work I admire. I wish them all success, including financial, as we work to take down this whole system. I am amazed at how far some people will go in order to avoid the real message, which is that we have to bring down this culture before it kills the planet. Everything else is really secondary, including how much I do or don’t make, my health, whether I’m supporting my mother, and so on.”
Great discussion.
A couple of points:
Are you aware of the research that suggests allergies and asthma might be linked to hook worms? It’s an interesting idea: Too many hook worms and we wind up with anemia, but with too few, we end of with allergies. Of course, it’s not proven, but it’s interesting.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/07/22/are-hookworms-the-next-claritin/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/01iht-01prof.14122951.html?_r=1
Another couple of points:
Most research suggests that most early Eurasian diseases started from close proximity to animals. Since we’ve had close connections with animals since the origin of our species (dogs, for example) then massive deaths related to disease is, most likely, a “natural” part of existence. The other poster needs to remember that the Bubonic Plague wiped out about a third of Eurasia’s population.
Last, the numbers of historical child-birth related deaths, both for mothers and children are staggering. They only dropped in the last hundred years, and have only dropped due to technological and cultural change. Any attempt to downplay them is not only dishonest, but deeply disrespectful to the millions of lives that were snuffed out simply due to having a baby – the most natural thing in the world.
I was a religious fan of Jensens for a long time, and a member of his forum, which you cannot get into now unless you agree with every one of his precepts from one of his last books. I like very much what I am reading. I know that a lot of what you said, he would have a response to but much of that response would be something about civilization that you can’t get around anyway. He and his groupies are like evangelical christians. They are very dogmatic, and you are right about the flood and the dam. That is exactly right, but because of what he has been through and how he can outspeak everyone, no one criticizes him, at least on his forum, and that is a scary thing and says it all. If I haven’t seen him criticized by those close to him in 5 years??
I am now in love with a scientist and realize the picture is much more complicated. I could go on and on. I am glad to see at least someone criticizing his spirit. I know he and his group is off, but you can’t convince upper middle class white people much, hasn’t history taught us that?
Ted,
Life is far too short to argue with idiots like you. Please go away.
However, a few points I won’t let by:
By the way, tons of my work is available online for free. See the sidebar. Also, no serious writer I know would sell people the right to see working drafts of his or her “work” (not unpublished, mind: unfinished work is what Jensen is selling off the right to see) because it’s not finished and therefore it’s not yet his or her work.
As for Jensen, his answer is incoherent because, obviously, he seems to believe there’s only one thing to be done: smash civilization, kill most of humanity, and let the salmon swim free. His moral idiocy blinds him to the fact that, no, not everything else is secondary. Not by a long shot.
Oh, and of course I haven’t read Endgame. I have much better things to do with my energy and time. Not unless I’m writing a public critique of him for a periodical or something.
Oh, and writing free responses to email? You may be surprised to hear that many authors do this. I’m writing a free response to your insulting rant, as well as providing space for you to disagree with me. I’d love to see Jensen provide even a tiny bit of space for disagreement on his website.
But he won’t.
Troy,
The hookworm thing is interesting! Thanks! As for the rest of your points — exactly.
Nolabound,
I am getting the impression that Jensen and his fans are indeed like evangelicals — their responses here have the same tang of ignorance, extremism, and defend-Derrick-to-the-death-ness about them.
One would hope that more people like you manage to extricate themselves from the echo chamber of Jensen fandom, but yeah, human nature being what it is, I think the best we can hope for is that it remains a relatively smallish cult, and dies out (or suicides itself away) before they do anything to hurt the general population.
For the stat slingers re: childbirth you might find it interesting to watch the documentary “the business of being born”.
And those interested in reality might want to read criticism of the film by someone a little more qualified to discuss it than Ricki Lake, of all people.
The commercialization of medicine is something I’m all for criticising — unnecessary C-sections are a common example, one that is insanely rampant where I live in Korea and which needs to be stamped out — and to some degree the repudiation of our own bodies and the process of life is something I’m similarly sympathetic to — though less so, because I don’t romanticize “the natural” like so many people seem to like to do — but to lump the scientific advances that have been made, and the benefits proceeding from them in with said commercialization is to commit a category error. As one RN comments on the post linked above, the default chances of any woman dying in childbirth just one hundred years ago were very significant. A woman dies every minute somewhere in the world in childbirth. Nature is not kind or benevolent in that respect, no matter how much we pretend it is.
People who romanticize human childbirth as “natural” (and therefore good) tend to ignore not just what history tells about the mass dangers of childbirth — to a degree the callousness of which is comparable to Jensen’s apparently pscyhopathic comfort with the extermination of the vast majority of humanity — but also the unique particularities of hominid physiology which make it harder for us to give birth than it is for most mammals.
When one starts holding up pseudo-intellectual feminist tropes about how the “empowerment” to choose to have a baby miles from a hospital without emergency help available if things go wrong, I start thinking about where the feminist theorists disappear to when the baby ends up brain damaged because a simple procedure went wrong in a way that wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d just been near or in a hospital. Certainly people whose babies end up handicapped for life, or dead, as a result of the inavailability of modern medical treatment in emergency find very little use for those fine-sounding theories of empowerment.
And, come to think of it, it is a singular irony that one of the great early figures of Western Anglophone feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, died as a result of a home childbirth gone wrong, as her widowed husband William Godwin described harrowingly in his memoir of her life. (Well worth reading, that book, and free at Gutenberg!)
The reality is that until there’s a complication, childbirth at home and childbirth in a hospital are roughly equally safe. But when something goes wrong, science, including medical, almost always can empower us, though in some places (like the US) the commercialization of medicine (among other things) gets in the way.
In other words, from the criticism I’ve run across online — I haven’t seen it and don’t plan to — the documentary seems ironically to throw out both baby and bathwater.
Which sounds like exactly the kind of thing to appeal to a devoted Jensen fanatic, however, and will definitely work toward the same goals that Jensen embraces, since removing modern medicine from the equation will kill off plenty of earnest prospective mothers who are Jensenites, along with their babies! I do feel badly for the children, even if my sympathy for the parents is tempered by their eligiblity for Darwin Awards, or, more likely, honorable mentions in a group category on the Darwin Awards website. (Along, more tragically, with anti-vaccine advocates and people who refuse blood transfusions.)
Hi everyone,
I am an “ex-Jensenist.” I put it in quotations because I use it partly for lack of a better word and partly because I can tell you that being involved in fanhood of the man and a once member of his discussion group, I can tell you that it was very much like a “Church” experience and a cult. Ironically, many of his close fans, many he considers friends, were once in extreme churches or other groups. You guys are very right on with a lot of what you say. I am glad to have to much to chew on as I get over it. I mean I was 19 or 20 when I first got into his ideas and started posting on his message board. I can tell you that they praise primitive cultures so much but when it comes to trying to understand what each other are saying, they make no allowances for age, or experience, or anything. Primitive cultures understand that young people are to be treated with patience and respect, well the jenseninians would kick me off for invading their boundaries or “being abusive” simply for disagreeing strongly. I would get booted even before i was understood. I tell you they are so off. I wonder if any of them have been out of this country because when you have, you start understanding the world is way to fucking big and diverse to possibly believe you have one answer. My anger toward them comes from knowing that they are just like what a lot of extreme writers were/are to feminism, internal backlash. That is they contradict the very essence of the cause they say they believe in by being dogmatic, naive, and unwilling to listen to anyone else. I agree that this is a part of a revenge fantasy. To the author. I live in Thailand off and on again. I havent been to Laos yet, but I know that I understand a good bit of the language since it is so close to Thai. I heard Laos can be even more beautiful in many parts. Good work. Never back down.
Dear Anonymous,
Thanks for sharing. I hope you continue to have the courage to share your experiences in the Jensen cult with others. It’s worth getting the word out about the nature of this group.
Cool, your living in Thailand part time, and yes, Laos is lovely, with lovely people, if you’re in the right mindset for the place. (Being on a writing deadline’s a bad state in which to visit.) I live in Korea, myself, though I’m currently in Indonesia!
Hi, I came across this discussion while searching for “Derrick Jensen criticism” on google. I was looking for that because of my very recent experience in communicating with the man. I hope this account will be useful to others who may be as interested as I am (or was) in what Mr Jensen had to say.
I first became aware of the man via a link to a website called End:Civ, which had a number of video clips from a documentary that is in progress. I found the clips interesting, because they seemed to talk about issues which I have long been really depressed about – the fact that we are slowly destroying this planet with our toxic civilization, killing species, destroying the air and water, etc etc. So then I dug a little deeper and discovered that behind it all was this man, Derrick Jensen, and the movie was actually adapted from a book (well, two books) that he wrote – “Endgame”. So I was feeling pretty excited to hear what this guy had to say – he seemed to be right on the same page as me! I went and bought both books as soon as I could.
At first, they seemed exactly what I was expecting – as with most disaster movies, the setup is always the best part. So I really got into the whole schtick – very enthusiastically, I might add, which is unlike me because I’m not generally a “joiner”. I am not religious, and I distrust group dogma of any kind. This book seemed to be a cry of pain about the world from someone who was very passionate and literate, someone who had hit the nail squarely on the head. And he was talking about civilization being “unredeemable” – how refreshing! Challenging some of the basic assumptions that all of us seem to have, that we have a right to be here doing what we do. I was happy. For a while.
I did start to notice, after a wee while, that there was a lot of repetition. As in, the entire book (Vol 1) seemed to be just a series of loosely connected rants that all said the same thing in different ways: The world is in trouble, how would you react if someone came and stole your land and poisoned your water, civilization is going to come down anyway, so wouldn’t it be better if we brought it down sooner rather than later (when I read this, some small part of me inside twitched briefly, but I swatted it down happily and carried on reading) – and also, another theme became apparent: He talked a lot about the fact that he had been abused by his father as a child. I mean, he mentions it… a lot. But this was ok, I was still enjoying his message.
I sought out his website and sent him an introductory message that basically said “bravo” and made a couple of small points about how (for example) another bad aspect of civilization which he hadn’t seemed to mention was that of large scale organization. The details don’t really matter – what does is that I was basically complimentary, and to my surprise he replied very quickly, with short notes. So far so good.
After a bit more reading, I decided to send him a second, longer email, this time with some more (I thought) “insightful observations” about the book, and thoughts that I had had while reading it. I assumed that these would be interesting to him, and I thought maybe we could have an interesting discussion about them. The email was pretty long, but one of the earlier paragraphs had this thought:
“I have never read any of your other books, but I have become aware through this one that you were obviously quite traumatised as a child, at the hands of your father. It strikes me that this trauma seems to be a primary “personal issue” that you are projecting onto the rest of the world.”
There was more, but this was the gist of it. I was kind of hesitant to include it, since it’s so personal, but he talked about it so much in the book that I just kind of assumed that he must be open to discussing it. I was really also assuming that he would give me some kind of rationale as to why this was invalid thinking. What I actually got back was a bit of a shock!
His email quoted a paragraph from an “upcoming book”, along with this: “Don’t write me again with any more of your insulting nonsense.” And after the quote, a final blow: “Don’t write me again. Derrick”.
I was kind of surprised, to say the least. For one thing, I didn’t think I had been particularly rude in my email; far from it, I actually prefaced by saying that I pretty much agreed 100% with everything he was talking about. But he ignored all the other points I made in the email, and focused instead completely on that one comment about his father. Hmmm.
So I wrote back to him (I know he said not to, but what could I do? I felt that he had completely misinterpreted my intentions, I was only trying to open a friendly dialog with the man). In my next email I was quite apologetic, and tried to make it very clear that I was very sorry if I had offended him by my (now clearly) thoughtless remark. I did mention also (because I’m not a complete doormat) that his reply had been kind of “violent”. Big mistake.
His next reply was much longer, and it’s really hard to summarize what he said, because it just seems so… well, angry. Actually, furious. The guy completely lost it, basically, and wrote a big long rant that excoriated me, and everything about me. This father issue of his seems to be a really, really big button, which I had pushed somewhat accidentally (ok, so I mentioned it, but was I really so offensive? It was just a thought, not a conclusion, I tried to make that clear right at the start of my email). And then, even after I attempted to apologise, he continued to rail against me. The man went absolutely balistic. Also telling, he said several times in this second email “Do not email me again”. He pretty much wanted to have his say, but not have any back and forth at all.
This was a little bit much, so I wrote to him again, this time taking off the kid gloves and telling him that he had basically invalidated his entire book through these couple of emails to me, and that he appeared to suffer from some sort of mental illness (schizoaffective disorder would be a good candidate, I think). He obviously carries around a lot of rage related to his father, and in my opinion he views the world through a warped lens.
The thing is, some of what he says seems to make sense. But the problem is that he only seems to see one color, whereas in reality there are many colors in the world. For example, if you say “There are many red things in this world” then you would be right – but there are also lots of green things, and blue, and so on and so forth. But Derrick only sees red, and so his vision seems to be limited. In the case of his father issues, he seems to want to project that onto everything he sees, and everything he comes into contact with. In his next reply to me he accused me of being a “garden variety abuser”, and also implied that I somehow wanted him to be my father (what?!?). At this point I had given up – I had made the somewhat stunning revelation, simply through a couple of emails, that the man is mentally unbalanced, and probably mentally ill (but, admittedly, high functioning).
This disturbed me for a while, because what did this then mean with regard to how his original points had seemed to resonate with me? Well, the answer is that it’s easy to point out problems. The hard part is coming up with solutions. And his solution seems to be very stark and unrealistic. He seems to believe that if we simply get rid of “civilization” (which, to him, means cities) then everything will go back to some sort of utopian stone age pre-industrial fantasy world. But he is ignoring a basic facet of humans: We co-operate with each other. We don’t only abuse and kill, we also help and nurture. But the big word here is “cooperate”.
So let’s say civilization goes away, and we’re left with a number of little sustainable villages spotted around the place. So then Bill in this village is very good at making leather harnesses for horses. So people start getting Bill to make harnesses for them, and in return they bring the things that they have – some eggs, perhaps, or some milk, or pottery, or whatever. And say Alice in the next valley over is really good at pottery – same thing will happen, and then Jedediah, who’s a really good fisherman, will try to catch more fish so that he can trade them for pots and harnesses. And Bill will take on an apprentice, because he doesn’t have time to make all these harnesses. And so it goes – that’s civilization in a nutshell – it’s not cities, it’s people cooperating and organizing, and leveraging off each others’ strengths to make the sum greater than the parts. As long as we are still people, this will go on.
Another mental disconnect I see with Jensen is the fact that he decries civilization and all its toxic trappings, and yet he publishes books on paper, wherein he rants about how all the forests are being cut down. How much in denial is this man? How can you talk about all this stuff, all the while using and benefitting from the same system? He tries to address this by talking about how we shouldn’t require the messenger to be “pure”, or some such nonsense. The trouble with Jensen’s screeds is that he appears to have a talent for weaving words together into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, in a way that is internally consistent. But that’s the trouble – it’s internally consistent, only if you accept some rather large premises that he takes as given. One of these seems to be that it’s ok to be a hyprocrite if you’re doing something worthwhile to “take the system down”. This is another way of saying that the ends justify the means, which is a rather dangerous and slippery slope to be on.
In my opinion, if you talk about bringing down civilization, then that should mean that you are willing to give up your own life to that end. Surely this is the only logical end point, since your entire argument centers around actions which will inevitably kill or hurt millions, if not billions of other people. So if you’re not willing to die yourself, then you are trying to save your own life while killing others – surely the definition of cowardice.
I am not denying that there is a problem with the world, but the hypocritical rantings of Jensen are not the answer. I came to this realization as soon as he started calling me an “abuser” and “EVERYTHING” he writes about in his books that is wrong with the world (really, he said that to me in his final email).
So here’s the thing: Say someone is yelling about how aliens are taking over the world, and say he sounds convincing, so you go over to talk to him. And then he very quickly starts accusing YOU of being an alien and rants in your face, spittle flying. Do you continue to put any stock in what he has to say? No, you back off and walk away.
The really stupid thing about all this is that I really am on his side, in a very basic way. I do pretty much agree with many of the problems he points out. I too abhor the loss of the salmon, and the redwoods, and all the other crimes against nature which he rants about in his book. But he managed to completely alienate me (pun intended), pushing me away and making me someone who is now rather dead set against his cause. So he claims somewhere to be a “good propagandist”, as a justification for why he writes rather than blowing up dams… I would say No, he is actually not a very good propagandist at all, because look what happened with me. I was pretty much on the same page as him, but he managed in very short order to make me regret ever laying eyes on his book.
One more thing: I noticed on the registration page for his forums, and also on the page for signing up to be in his “book club” (to read unfinished material) that there is most definitely a sense that he does not want any disagreement at all. On the book club, he says explicitly that he does not want criticism – at all. So this is really kind of sad – he is obviously only interested in an echo chamber. How delicate must his sense of self righteousness be, that he cannot bear even the slightest questioning of his ideas? And how unhealthy is this as an environment for evolving ideas and philosophies? The more I look at this man, the more it looks like some sort of sick cult – you have to buy 100% into everything he says, obviously, and become a sycophant of the highest order, otherwise you are cast out. How very, very sad.
He raises good points, but goes nowhere with them. Next.
Thanks,
Neil Gunton
Neil,
Wow. I can’t respond to everything here, nor do I feel I ought to — it speaks for itself — but I will mention two things.
The first is that I myself had a very negative online clash with an author once. I haven’t posted about it here because he’s a very well-known author, but one of the things that resonated weirdly with this case was that this author made a similar claim of me seeing him as a “Daddy.” Which was out of nowhere — I wasn’t even a big fan of his work, really, a few books aside — but which was certainly suggestive of a few of his own delusions.
(I later discovered that this author’s “problems” are well-known in the particular literary community in which he works, though nobody talks about it much.)
The other thing is that in this case, I was almost inclined to give Jensen just a little leeway. One sometimes sees interpretations of one’s work that drive one bananas. Even more when they’re potentially right, than when one feels one has been “misread.” I recently ran across a critique of a story of mine that is called sexist and misogynistic, but I was able to laugh because, well, the person apparently missed most of the point of it. And hasn’t yet learned to separate character POV from the author in real life.)
But the spittle-flecked ranting your exchange finally developed into seems to me, well, indicative of a lot. While I’ve even had the experience of someone very aggressively psychologizing everything I said — a guy on a mailing list I once frequented — it didn’t take me long to figure out that ranting at him did neither him nor me any good.
But I think two things:
1. Someone needs to write a book abut Jensen, not only pulling apart his arguments but also analyzing his claims about his background and so on.
2. Anyone who does so would have to interact with the man eventually, and I’m not sure I’m up for that.
Maybe an article, though.
Dear discussion participants,
My name is Wendy Lynne Lee, and I’m a professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. I publish in environmental and ecologically feminist philosophy as well as Marxist and neo-Marxist theory (most recent book: Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues, 2009, Broadview). I have been following the online discussion about Derrick Jensen’s work (as well as Lierre Keith’s), and I am very struck by the capacity he has for recruiting true believers with respect to claims–particularly concerning the end of civilization–that are demonstrably poorly argued/justified/evidenced.
To be very clear–I am a serious environmentalist, and much of what Jensen and the folks from the “Deep Green Resistance” decry as wrong is certainly on track. But the way in which he casts “civilization”–as if it were an evil god of some sort–a conscious and conspiring agent almost–is, well, just disturbing and grotesquely simplistic. It is also too easily translated into a “reason” to commit genocide. I’m sure Jensen would be horrified by this suggestion, but the more of his work I read, the more convinced I am that his rhetorical aims are not that different from, say, Glenn Beck’s. This is manifestly NOT to say that the content of Jensen’s rhetoric is anything like Beck’s, but it is to suggest that the apocalyptic strategy he evokes to gain and motivate his true believers is very much in this mode–and I think it not merely dangerous, but deeply self-defeating.
In any case, I have given a good deal of thought to what it is exactly that I find disturbing in Jensen’s work–withy respect not only to the environment, but with respect to issues of social justice, war–the whole range of Left-oriented issues, and it strikes me as just true that Jensen does not see the contradiction in his own work between bringing down civilization and obliterating even the hope for social and economic justice–notions for which some form of civilization is defining and requisite.
I am preparing to write the book the previous poster suggested–and have submitted a proposal to a prospective publisher. I have interacted with Jensen by email a little bit–and while he was very cordial, he clearly does not wish to brook criticism (as one poster here points out, he’s quite explicit about this on his website). I would welcome further communication with him–but I don’t think he’s interested in alternative accounts/arguments. Yet it’s precisely this “either you’re with us or against us” position that I find disturbing, self-defeating, Tea Party–and ultimately fascist.
I very much appreciate the insight of many of the posters here–and would certainly appreciate any remarks, suggestions, or thoughts you might have.
Thanks!
Wendy,
Wow. Well, now I am feeling a bit vindicated: I was thinking of writing a paper for the Utopias conference on the dystopianism of Derrick Jensen’s work. (It seems to me quite interesting how he’s adopted a lot of tropes from SF — dystopian, apocalyptic, cautionary-tale, sorts of SF — while repudiating the optimism, the futurism, and the technological ideology inherent in SF. He’s sort of the dark mirror opposite of Bruce Sterling in his Viridian Movement mode.
That doesn’t actually baffle me much. I mean, people aren’t quite willing to believe anything — nobody worships the invisible teapot that orbits the earth, watching over our good and evil acts with respect to tea — but within the range of things people are willing to buy is a pretty enormous range of insane stuff, most of it unfounded and a lot of it quite loony.
I agree that “serious environmentalists” can disagree with Jensen: I also think, quite honestly, that Jensen’s claims about “civilization” are wrong. In fact, it seems like a version of what Rudy Rucker calls the Fatalist Synecdoche, the effect on an author’s work of the author’s conscious awareness of his or her own impending passing — as we see in late books of HG Wells. (Wells saw his own life ending, and mapped it onto the world; Jensen sees an iredeemable sickness in his family, and maps it onto civilization as a whole.)
I find it particularly interesting how you describe the casting, by Jensen, of “civilization” as some sort of “evil god” — it does take on Lovecraftian overtones. Which is to say, Jensen’s work draws upon the techniques of SF writing in a number of ways, whether Jensen realizes it or not: not just the dystopian futurist imagery, or the claims for scientific credibility (with little actual science to back it up); but also the whole “sensawunda” [“sense of wonder”] mystique in SF (as descended from the gothic literary aesthetic of “terror” at the scope and scale of the immense natural world), which Jensen has mutated to a kind of “sensahorror” — cheapened, as with the sensawunda, by its own untenability and fantastical nature, but compelling for many nonetheless.
And yes, as I’ve commented a number of times, genocide is one of the obvious implications for the destruction of “civilization” that Jensen advocates. I seem to remember him addressing that, actually, somewhere, writing something like, “Well, if it comes down to just us, or all of nature, I know who I think should be eliminated.” Not quite that bluntly, but close. Somewhere in, I think, A Language Older Than Words. So I don’t think he’d be horrified: I am sure he rationalized all of that long ago. Self-defeating is definitely a good descriptor, because balanced, sane people are never, ever going to get on board with an environmental movement that holds up someone like Jensen as important, thoughtful, etc. Because, yeah, I see something rather fascistic in his work too, that which I’ve read. He’d be baffled by the descriptor, I imagine, but his opposition to any critique or disagreement is just too much for any sensible person to accept.
As for your book — I hope this isn’t offensive, but I do hope, very respectfully, that it’s aimed at the general reader. That is, at the same sort of person for whom Jensen writes, audience-wise. An academic treatise will alert academia, but a more general-reader text would be more useful in debunking Jensen’s ideas in a public way. As far as I see it, Jensen’s ideology is a bit like cancer. Better to attack it where it is found.
I’d love to have a book I could hand to someone and say, “Look, read this. Seriously, just read it.” But to get people who take Jensen seriously, or who feel some kind of affinity with his ideas, to take the criticism seriously, I think all other barriers to reading — such as the things that make academic discourse, well, academic — need to be removed, even if only to a notes section at the end.
But of course, I shouldn’t assume you’re planning on writing something academic. Perhaps you’ve already considered all that.
I don’t have much more to add right now, as I haven’t read or thought about Jensen in a while (unless you’d like to talk more about the SF angle: if so, email me… this is my blog, there’s a contact link at the top of the page), but some of the commenters above, having been more deeply involved in Jensenism, may be of some help to you. Some are unlikely to be subscribed to this thread, so you might consider trying to contact them directly.
It’s easy for Jensen to tell people they shouldn’t have modern amenities. But I would like to see him go to a densely populated slum in a third word nation and tell all the people they don’t deserve, refrigeration, sewage systems, and god forbid internet.
Only someone very much of the bourgeoisie could be a primitivist. You will never hear people that are poverty stricken spouting anti-civ ideologies.
And the division of labor will never go away. Yes, someone will always be more talented and more productive than someone else. Thankfully, in a free society, greed meets ostracism, rather than being rewarded.
Great comments all. Jensen is scary. Call me Freud, but I suspect he harbors deep seated sexual frustrations and repressions.
soahc,
I agree with most of what you say — I’d love to see Jensen go live in Jakarta and “make do” with the water most people have to use for washing and drinking, let alone going without refrigeration or air conditioning. His praise of dumpster diving in A Language Older Than Words… that sort of thing would get him in the hospital in one or two days flat in most third world cities. Yeah, yeah he’s saying how wasteful the first world is. And it is. But, um, are we talking about “civilization”, a global phenomenon we see improving lives in many places, or just about American wastefulness?
Anti-civ and bourgeois, yep.
However, I’m not so sure that greed isn’t rewarded in free societies. It seems to be rather well-rewarded from what I can tell in a number of societies… primarily because of the structure and legal status corporations enjoy, but also because of the particular cultures that happened to have succeeded earliest in terms of capitalist development.
And while I’m not sure about the Freudian reading, it’s not hard to see some kind of psychological issues at the root of Jensen’s ranting and railing.
Hi
RE Gordy’s response to Wendy 09.09.10
As for your book — I hope this isn’t offensive, but I do hope, very respectfully, that it’s aimed at the general reader. That is, at the same sort of person for whom Jensen writes, audience-wise. An academic treatise will alert academia, but a more general-reader text would be more useful in debunking Jensen’s ideas in a public way. As far as I see it, Jensen’s ideology is a bit like cancer. Better to attack it where it is found.
Please could you inform as to the difference between an “academic text” and a “general reader text?” Do “academics” live in another dimension that is not for the “general reader?” I do know “experts” like to use convoluted language and they cannpt resist throwing in some latin and references to Greek mythology!
I have read Mr Jensen’s work and other anarcho primitists. Ultimately, I belive the point they are making is try and get people to really really think about people, time and space, the human condition etc.
Cheers
Dave
Dave,
There is a vast difference in the way one writes for an academic audience, versus how one writes for a general audience. For one tiny example, I mentioned the important scholar (in Science Fiction Studies) Frederic Jameson, who is a Marxist literary scholar. For someone in the world of literary criticism, someone else’s Marxism isn’t a big deal; it’s one of a number of academic schools which one may choose as an influence. But a non-academic friend I know thought this meant he was some sort of throwback Maoist/Stalinist sycophant.
Personally, I think the stylistics of academic writing are such that one can torture the audience more. General readers tend to be less patient and less willing to put up with crap writing. Indeed, there’s not just references to Latin or Greek mythology, but whole specialized vocabularies, and whole sets of knowledge that one can assume the (specialist) reader already knows, which one would never dare use with a general audience.
As to your comments about Jensen and the other anarcho-primitivists:
the point they are making is try and get people to really really think about people, time and space, the human condition etc.
… well, that’s so vague as to be meaningless. I mean, the same could be said for SF authors, for example, or even of the German SS in its day. The important question, which you’re skipping, is what they’re trying to get people to think about those things, and whether it’s tenable or not. (I think almost everyone would agree what the SS was trying to get people to think about people, time and space, the human condition, etc. was completely evil, untenable, and stupid.)
Whether one thinks that what Jensen and his colleagues is saying is tenable or not seems to be the basis of whatever dispute is being played out in this comment thread.
Hi Gordseller.
Thank you for you reply. Personally, I have a vision of humanity continuing along into further degregation, possibly into full disintegration, and as We do, We will still be arguing the toss; so determined to be “right.” It is though We do not have the capacity to recognise that We may be, just may be on the verge of, if not already fucked! For something seemingly so simple, it is all very complicated. Any discussion usually ends up in semantics and rival theories yet within it all, just maybe the “fact” that We are killing ourselves? I just hope that if this is the case, it is all worth it..better to dead than alive??
It seems that people cannot (or are prepared not to) live together..two is company and two is a crowd!
Regarding academia, you said it: they academics like to hide behind convoluted language and when asked to give a straight answer, they find it necessarily impossible because that would be betraying their reality and their investment in creating that reality?
I have really enjoyed reading the whole thread but I have to wonder whether or not the thread and the thousands like it and the millions of books that have been written and all that academia, has actually got Us anywhere?
It would appear being right is everything, even if that means death to all?
Arguably, the human race went on a debate for so many thousands of years and in the process ending up destroying itself because it was too busy trying to prove a point?
“But you would not listen would you?” (said The Outsider).
Dave
(In Not-so Great Britain)
What put me off Jensen was a statistic quoted in “A language older than words.” which was not just wrong–but wildly off, by more that a factor of 10. It was, of course, a shocking statistic. And dead wrong. This was in the second edition, so you would have thought that someone would have been checking this stuff. Made me wonder how many of the other things he is saying are factually inaccurate. No way to know, but I find it difficult to take him seriously.
Which statistic was that? (Do you recall?) I have no doubt there are others, though I also imagine even if he had the stats right throughout, he’d still err on the side of insane when it came down to interpretation of the data.
Unfortunately, I have taken the book back to the library and cannot give you the page number but the statistic was “40,000 American workers die on the job each year” (no footnote) ?????. No. The best estimates from a century ago (CDC) are 18,000-21,0000 in 1912. In the last 10 years fatalities have been between 4300 and 6800 with that number trending down. Rates (fatalities per 100,000) have gone down 90% since we started keeping good records. I did find, subsequently, a reference to a CDC document “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 45:445-446, 1996” which estimated that 137 workers die everyday from work-related illnesses. The reference was in another CDC report “Healthy People 2010” but the original document, or the “Clarification” from the same year, I could not find on the web. 137 workers a day is about 50,000/year. Most of those deaths from workplace related illnesses are probably from exposures 20-30 years previous. I was an OSHA inspector in the late 70s, when we still had an industrial base, and the situation was grim indeed. So perhaps that is where he got the number. Either way, it is a level of slop that makes me question his credibility.
I, like Wendy am a serious environmentalist and a feminist. I don’t actually disagree with most of Jensen’s opinions of modern civilization, and I think the current population is certainly not sustainable in any world I can imagine living in (but of course, I may simply lack imagination). I don’t think he is doing it for the money. I just think there is something strange and cultish about Jensen and while I may agree with some of his insights, I don’t trust his analysis or his motivations. His writing incites violence, pure and simple, and I worry about some of the true believers taking that path.
I hope Wendy writes her book. Particularly since Jensen’s first book “A Language. . .” is widely assigned in women’s studies courses. I will be looking for it.
http://dotsub.com/view/7b5c24b7-ecf4-4fc3-86f1-baaf03f78191
Hi there,
I am guessing you want to have faith in science because it’s overwhelming to not have faith given how serious things are now. I do too. But after I saw this movie and read a ton of books I have concluded that they can’t save us. It’s just a question of simple math and it’s pretty clear. Check it out and see what you think. I totally didn’t believe it. But now that I know I can figure out what to do based on reality.
Best,
premadasi
By the way, way back up there is a comment by Premdadi Amada. Sorry for not noticing, you comment somehow ended up in the pending list and I missed it till today. I’ve read a bunch of books too, and some of them suggest that, yeah, there’s nothing we can do… especially books like Jensen’s. However, other books I’ve read suggest there must be ways forward that we haven’t yet figured out. So does history and experience: our imagination is pretty narrow, in the common sphere, but desperation sometimes pushes us to great advances. I will admit that I think it’s better to hope than not to. But it’s stupid to hope things will stay the same, I agree.
D.Berry
So, just to eliminate any prejudice on your part: are you “put off” everybody you read whose statistics you don’t agree with? You quote one statistic and that is your reason for being put off!
You also state: “I don’t think he is doing it for the money. I just think there is something strange and cultish about Jensen and while I may agree with some of his insights, I don’t trust his analysis or his motivations.” So where is your evidence to back up your claims?
Regards
Dave
I am put off by people (and their publishers) who print statistics that are incorrect (by a large margin), & could easily have been checked. If they have the facts wrong, then I don’t trust their analysis based on those facts. My sense that he is not doing it for the money (except that we all need to make a living) is an intuition, nothing more. And other, previous comments by people who have been part of his online group and who have corresponded with him make me think he is something of a cult figure–especially his intolerance of criticism and his demand that people agree with him completely on all points–no middle ground.
D. Berry
That was a quick response.
You state: “And other, previous comments by people who have been part of his online group and who have corresponded with him make me think he is something of a cult figure especially his intolerance of criticism and his demand that people agree with him completely on all points no middle ground.”
May I suggest that research this more fully: check out the numerous radio interviews Jensen has done: he takes questions regularly. He has been on TV (eg: Democracy Now) on took questions in which he states his position on violence.
He will answer questions but he will not be distracted and led in to areas which are not the focus of his work which pisses people off such as some people on this thread.
How can anyone demand from anyone that one must agree?
Why don’t you email him?
I have emailed him and I have said that I do not agree on everything he writes. He replied within a couple of days and he wasn’t ranting and being intolerant. Indeed, for someone as busy as he appears to be, I was surprised to get a reply, let alone one so soon.
Don’t be lazy and presumptuous is my advice to you. Before, joining the list of Jensen detractors, why not do yourself a favour and actually find out for yourself?
Regards
Dave
A brief note about recent comments:
Emailing with Derrick Jensen (or for that matter Lierre Keith) is virtually impossible unless you are an avowed cheerleader of his apocalyptic position. In my first attempts–about a year ago–I, like Dave, found him cordial enough. However, it became clear very quickly that were I not to become a convert, he was not interested in continuing any dialogue. I have tried this in several venues–including his website where he explicitly rejects commentary that does not endorse his view. I have been critical–but by no means rude, mean-spirited, or unfair. For an account of this effort please go here:
philosleft.blogspot.com/2010/08/open-letter-to-radical-environmental.html
Evidence DOES matter, and Jensen has very little concern for this. Not only are many of his sources biased in favor of his view, not only does he not address plausible criticism, but he far too often either exaggerates or makes claims that demand proof–but for which he offers none. Moreover, his publisher is also wholly unwilling to even consider publishing works critical of Jensen’s eco-primitivism–regardless the credentials of the author, and Jensen comes very close to having a conflict of interest here as PM Press is for all practical purposes a guaranteed publication for him–and therefore a vanity press (for anyone who’d like a copy of this correspondence, I’m happy to share it).
This is not good in the long run for the environmental movement.
Wendy Lynne Lee