Where did we humans “take the wrong turn”? | Reader’s Correspondence

…and what does the term “natural” even mean? --- [Estimated reading time: 20 min.]

Art produced by our (symbolically thinking) cousins, the Neanderthals.

Once again, a reader has posed a few very interesting questions and raised objections in response to my latest essay, Where we go when we die, that I thought are worth examining in greater detail (thanks again, Paul!). What follows is my response, which would have been too long to post as a comment (and has thus been promoted to a regular blog post).

Some of the main questions were:

• Does it make sense to call civilization “unnatural” and all other subsistence modes “natural”?

• What even is the difference between “natural” and “unnatural”?

• Where do you draw the line between them?

• Isn’t the real schism the one that separates animals that are capable of symbolic thought from those that aren’t?

• And, consequently (and with a bit of irony), does that mean that Homo habilis was more “natural” than Homo sapiens?

This is not a regular essay, so if you’re not interested in the subtle minutiae of primitivist ideology, feel free to ignore this mail and wait for the next proper essay.
For the full comment (and context), please read Paul’s original comments here – he makes some really good points.

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First of all, thank you for your comment and your criticism, Paul, I always welcome divergent ideas and opinions. I just hope you’re not a philosopher (your comment sounds a bit aggrieved), but if you are, I am sorry if the introductory section of the essay offended you. I was merely being provocative.

Allow me to defend the “common primitivist trope” right quick: I am well aware that nothing exists in pure binaries, and it was not my intention to create a binary (or even the idea that I peddle such oversimplifications). If you’re familiar with my earlier writing (‘Ten Guiding Principles’ comes to mind, or the first ‘FAQ’), you might know that I fully accept that there are no binaries, and everything exists on a spectrum – which nonetheless usually has two extremes. In writing things like the essay in question you don’t get around having to simplify a few core concepts – otherwise it would easily become a 500-page philosophy book, right? And while I am the first one to decry binaries as the abstract and alienated product of the left brain hemisphere’s mode of thinking and perceiving, I do occasionally make use of the two opposing extremes of a spectrum.
Such is the case with my personal differentiation between what’s “natural” and what’s “unnatural.”

While one can certainly make the argument that everything in this world is natural, including modern cities, PFAS, satellites and nuclear waste, I’m sure we can all agree that sometimes it does make sense to differentiate between two opposing concepts, ones that I call (for lack of better terminology) “natural” and “unnatural.”
But can those concepts be applied to human cultures? And, if yes, how? What makes a culture “unnatural”?
That there is a massive difference between the ideologies and worldviews of the inhabitants of Rome, Uruk, Tenochtitlan, Chang’an and Memphis and the various bands of foragers that still roamed the peripheries at the same time is pretty obvious, I think. Perhaps you know Daniel Quinn? If not, I’d respectfully urge you to check out his books ‘Ishmael’ and ‘The Story of B.’
Something really important changed when people transitioned from a mixed subsistence strategy relying heavily on foraging to becoming full-time farmers who plant almost exclusively grain monocultures. Again, this is not a binary on-off switch, like the standard narrative of the “Agricultural Revolution” suggests. The transition took centuries, sometimes millennia, for each culture that underwent it, and although you can’t point to a single day on which their mindset suddenly changed, it is blatantly obvious that people on one end of the spectrum think very differently than the folks on the other end, in a few pretty crucial ways.

Most importantly, as Daniel Quinn has pointed out so aptly, people on the one side of the spectrum, the civilization-builders he calls the Takers (I know, another simplification that seems like a binary, but for the purpose of having any meaningful discussion we sometimes have to resort to such simplifying umbrella terms, otherwise we get stuck in the confused, postmodernist mud of not really knowing what anything means, or what reality even is, or if there even is such a thing as reality) have one way to look at the world, and the (semi-)nomadic foragers on the other side of the spectrum, the people he calls Leavers, have a very different one.

Takers think that the world literally belongs to them, and that they can do with it what they like. They have no problem turning an immensely diverse ecosystem that feeds thousands of different species into an ecological desert intended to feed only themselves, a single species, and maybe a handful of unwanted “pests” that “parasitize their crop” and thus deserve to be wiped off the surface of the planet for their capital offense.
Leavers don’t think like that. Leavers live their lives “in the hand of the gods,” as Quinn puts it, and don’t assert dominance over the entire biosphere. They follow a few unwritten (and unspoken) rules, natural laws, that Quinn called “The Law of Life.”
One such Law is the Law of Limited Competition: “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.”
This is a law that every single species of animal or plant follows - except civilized humans (ancient and modern).

Even fairly complex societies like the Pacific Northwesterners (who were able to grow and complexify their societies considerably due to the same, unusually stable Holocene climate as the agriculturalists) followed this law. They didn’t “deviate from the natural state,” they just show how a natural human society looks like in which modest surplus accumulation (enabled by a stable climate that caused rivers to stabilize and flood predictably) leads to a shift from the more egalitarian end of the spectrum into the authoritarian side.
But they were not Takers: they didn’t attempt to exploit all the salmon, or deny the bears upstream access to said salmon. They didn’t eradicate other fish species that might compete with salmon, just as they didn’t attempt to exterminate the cultures around them, they didn’t excavate wetlands to make more space for salmons, and they didn’t try to control and “improve” the salmon’s reproductive cycle. There were good years and bad years, and their fate was ultimately still in the hand of the gods.

Not so the agriculturalists. They could not accept that they must hope for the gods’ mercy, and so they started taking matters into their own hands. They weren’t content with cultivating some of their food, like various horticultural Leaver cultures did during the Holocene, they wanted to cultivate all their food and share it with nobody. Birds became “pests” to be deterred, wolves became “predators” to be eradicated, and wildflowers became “weeds” to be torn up, because nothing was allowed to “steal their food.” Again, the difference between Leavers and Takers is not a binary: this shift happened over hundreds or even thousands of years (in the case of the Fertile Crescent), and presumably happened so slowly that the people to whom it happened had no way of knowing what was happening or where it would lead. They basically stumbled head over heels into a “progress trap” (in the words of Ronald Wright). Once they realized, it was too late, and they were trapped within the entrails of Leviathan (in the words of Fredy Perlman).

Furthermore, there were plenty of Leaver cultures that went down the road towards becoming Takers for a while, only to backpedal as soon as they realized what was happening to their societies and cultures. Various Southeast Asian hill cultures have been suspended in this limbo for centuries, sometimes seeking the proximity of the civilizations in the valleys, and at other times retreating further uphill, depending on how coercive and totalitarian the elites of the valley states happened to be. But the hill people never became the valley states, and they avoided them consciously. They were well aware of the things you had to give up when turning into a Taker: most importantly, autonomy and freedom.

Nobody knows if the various tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for instance, would have become Takers over time, but in order to do so they would have had to break the Law of Limited Competition (or any other natural law) along the way, and start to perceive themselves at the top of a hierarchy in which all other living beings are below them and thus have less right to exist. In reality, they worshipped other animals. To become Takers, they would have had to actively interfere with the natural life cycles of their staple foods on a massive scale, making them prone to imagine themselves as the masters and lords of those organisms, god-like in their powers.

Showing of masks at Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw potlatch. Definitely a delayed-return society.

Due to the seasonal overabundance of salmon that translated directly into a higher population density, they had some warfare – which is the natural response to all sorts of animals to overcrowding and competition for a limited resource base.

We primitivists don’t say that “humans lived the same way for 99% of our existence,” we say that we lived pretty much the same way. Obviously not everyone lived exactly the same: some relied more on fishing, others more on nut trees, still others hunted mostly big game. Those differences in subsistence mode are reflected in those peoples’ cultures, cosmologies, and maybe even consciousnesses, at least to some extent. No indigenous tribe is the same – but there are a few really important similarities, which we shouldn’t disregard.

I double down on my claim that groups that were living within the limits of the Law of the Land (the ones I deem “genuinely primitive,” although I’d never use that terminology) had a correct assessment of the natural state of humans – and that the dominant culture deviated from that state. That’s why Native American cultures concluded that the colonizers must be victims of some terrible disease that made them behave that way and cannibalize the entire landscape. They called it Wetiko, or Windigo, depending on the dialect. Those people were not behaving how “normal” people behave. They ravaged people, animals, and the landscape in a bloodthirsty frenzy, so that the obvious conclusions by natural cultures was that there must be something seriously wrong with those “civilized” people.

Again, this “deviation” from the natural state seems obvious even to indigenous commentators, and there is no shortage of indigenous thinkers who point that out.

So, how can I possibly allege that civilization is not “natural?” After all, it’s humans, themselves natural organisms, that build them? In a way, yes, the distinction doesn’t make much sense, but for the sake of discussions like these, it does make plenty of sense to make a clear distinction. Civilization and grain monocultures are “unnatural” because they are highly unstable evolutionary strategies, strategies that are self-eliminating and thus represent a deviation from the norm – from what’s “natural” – and a pretty short-lived deviation at that! We tend to think of history as this immensely long period, but only because we look at it from an individual human’s perspective. From our perspective, it is out of question that civilizations are extremely important examples for what it means to be human. Not so from an evolutionary or biological perspective. The unusually stable climate that allowed some civilizations to flourish for a few millennia is officially over, and with the end of the Holocene comes the inevitable end of Civilization. In the greater scheme of things, people building civilizations are just weird outliers, people who attempted to eliminate all feedback that kept the balance since time immemorial, and almost drove themselves to extinction in the process. Once the climate becomes as erratic and unpredictable as it usually is (and has been during 99% of our existence), people will have no other chance than to continue with the “natural state,” since agriculture is now simply not possible anymore.

Of course, there are massive differences between the earliest bands of Homo sapiens and later, more complex societies (so-called delayed-return hunter-gatherers), but those are differences in degree, not differences in kind. The later societies were still a part of the landscape, although they obviously became more skilled at modifying the ecological niche they inhabit – to the benefit of the vast majority inhabiting those ecosystems, not exclusively to their own benefit. They expanded the grasslands, which benefited the bison, which also benefited the bears and wolves, which was not a problem at all for those cultures. They didn’t mind wolves and bears eating bison, because they didn’t consider themselves the owners and masters of the bison (unlike agriculturalists/Takers, who are really totalitarian when it comes to “their” livestock).

My point here is that some cultures stopped simply expanding or modifying their ecological niche, and instead started to dramatically reconfigure entire niches, which, especially in the long term, always meant destroying them. You take a biodiverse forest/savanna, raze it to the ground, and plant the land in a single species of annual grass, which you won’t share with any other living being.
Please tell me you see the difference here as well!

I usually include all species of the genus Homo into my considerations, since they were obviously humans as well: early humans. Again, this does not mean that I lump them into one binary corner, in diametric opposition to Australopithecus, but that they are a part of a spectrum that tends towards complexity and the capability for obvious abstract thought (among a few other things).
Agricultural societies (and, concomitantly, civilizations) are basically “complexity (and abstraction) in overdrive,” a failed attempt at increased complexity that turns out to be short-lived because it depletes the very resource base those societies depend on.

The point is not to draw a clear line (that’s merely what our left brain hemisphere wants us to do), the point is to acknowledge that there are differences between two extremes on a spectrum. It is pointless to look for a line here, and we just have to go with the right hemisphere here and accept the ambiguity.
I don’t deny change. I don’t deny evolution. Species evolve, and along the way they change some things. Our ancestors left the trees and became bipedal. This is not a digression or deviation from what’s “natural,” that is being natural. Again, the oversimplified difference I make here is one between slow, natural change due to evolution, and some cultures suddenly thinking that they should take matters in their own hand – and laying waste to the entire biosphere while attempting to do that. If anyone will be around for that, the 10,000-year Holocene will be remembered as a time of “boom and bust,” of some cultures pursuing a highly unstable evolutionary strategy (and subsequently merging into a single-globe-spanning culture), one that’s destined to fail. Of course, in a way, that’s “natural” as well, but for the purpose of this discussion, let’s just agree that it doesn’t represent the norm for human beings in any meaningful way, except for individual humans that happen to be alive during the tiny sliver of human history that contains those rogue cultural abscesses.

In our hypothetical scenario, Homo habilis might definitely have some strong opinions about later humans deliberately sitting dangerously close to a blazing fire – but he would be absolutely horrified if you’d show them civilization (often, indigenous people were literally horrified at how civilized people lived). He’d instantly agree that his kind have much more in common with the Pacific Northwestern cultures (and with other, more complex delayed-return foragers such as the Yanomami) than with people who raze entire forests to the ground, mine soil fertility until the land degrades into deserts, exterminate all game animals, build settlements as dense as termite colonies, and multiply far beyond any reasonable scale.
In short, Homo habilis most definitely “had the same ‘correct’ understanding of ‘the natural state of humans’ as a Mesolithic Briton” – namely that we humans are animals, not gods.

I undoubtedly think it is a valuable and interesting perspective to make a division between symbolic thought and direct experience (if you want to call it that). But that differentiation is rather pointless in any real sense for the issue at hand, because while we can definitely envision people reverting to a foraging lifestyle, we absolutely cannot conceive of any human cultures abolishing symbolic thought. It is part of who we are. It was a huge rift, yes, but it was not in and of itself an evolutionary dead end. There is no way we can build civilizations (which depend on us depleting the resource base we depend on) and hold the Taker worldview (that presupposes that we humans have the right to appropriate the entire planet and disregard any other species that doesn’t provide us with an immediate benefit) and not go extinct.
But there is definitely a way in which we use symbolic thought and not go extinct.
If it wasn’t for the Holocene (which started out as a regular interglacial), if the climate would have swung back into Ice Age mode, we would still find sustainable human cultures, complete with symbolic thought, that exist in a dynamic equilibrium with the ecosystems they inhabit, and thus exist, to put it simply, in balance with their environment.

Earlier cultures capable of symbolic thought didn’t cause the extinction of several dozen species per day, nor did they raze over half the world’s forests or erode most of its topsoil. One single culture did that (or, to be more precise, several iterations of the same underlying cultural beliefs, that complimented and reinforced each other and ultimately merged into Global Civilization), and that culture happened to be capable of symbolic thought. Yet it was not the capability to think symbolically that led them to lay waste to the planet, but the belief that they are better and more deserving than any other life form. Hence my difference in where I draw the line.

Cultures capable of symbolic thought are further removed from direct experience than those who aren’t, but that doesn’t mean they are in any meaningful way more disconnected from their environment. Most prehistoric symbolic imagery (and hence thought) depicts other animals, so the connection to one’s environment is simply elevated to a new level of abstraction – but that connection isn’t severed. (Now contrast that to modern or contemporary art.)

I don’t say that you’re wrong – the shift from direct experience to symbolic thought is/was a massive shift, a real gamechanger. But I wouldn’t use that as an example of where to draw the line between the (admittedly entirely artificial) concepts of “natural” and “unnatural,” since that would raise the rather silly question of whether Homo habilis was any more “natural” than Homo erectus, or whether Homo neanderthalensis was already “less natural,” since symbolic thought, art and music were steady features of their culture.

Drawing the line where I did means that pretty much all cultures of Homo sapiens behaves in a perfectly natural, normal way (otherwise they’d be extinct), whereas another culture literally runs amok and kills everything in its wake in a futile attempt to “rule the world.”

Furthermore, I’m quite sure that Neanderthals were Animists – they practiced endocannibalism, the ritualistic form of ingesting deceased loved ones, which in their context makes little sense from a nutritional perspective, but makes plenty of sense if you think about it in spiritual terms. I highly recommend Rebecca Sykes’ 2020 book “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art” for more info on Neanderthal symbolic thought and practices.

I actually do “like Animism because the lifeway aesthetic of earlier humans that practiced/experienced Animism resonates” with me. But that’s not the only reason, and I’d be lying if I said it would be. I simply say that a certain kind of spirituality (remember, animism is an umbrella term) prevailed over the vast majority of human existence on this planet, which is a difficult thing to refute (especially when compared with virtually all later forms of institutionalized spirituality that relied on specialists, human-like gods, and temples and other monumental architecture), and that seems to be the natural default for Homo sapiens.

Moreover, would you really disagree that “a human must ‘live naturally,’ or perhaps, at a minimum, study what natural living looks like, in order to ‘correctly assess’ the natural state of humans”?
Doesn’t it make plenty of sense that one should study what happened during 99 percent of our existence here before claiming one knows anything about human Nature? What good is an interpretation of human Nature if it ignores the vast majority of human cultures and virtually the entire time we’re here?

Again, the main reason why I think Animism is superior (from my own, subjective perspective!), is that animist cultures didn’t destroy the planet. They didn’t poison the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. They didn’t raze whole forests to the ground and rip up entire mountains. There are a million different shapes that “Animism” can take and has taken historically, and I could find something to haggle over with each and every one of them, but the point here is that while those cultures might have a quaint belief here and there, they didn’t destroy the land they inhabit. They didn’t compromise the existence of future generations for their own short-term gain.
That’s why wherever the colonizers stumbled over native populations, those natives inhabited extraordinarily rich landscapes (like those encountered by the first settlers that colonized North America).

It all boils down to the rule of thumb that Aldo Leopold expressed in his Land Ethic:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Again, this does not mean that we should fall for left-brain dualism, and say that we should only do “right” things, and never “wrong” ones, but we should acknowledge that it is better for us and everyone else inhabiting this world if we tip the scale in favor of the former.

Am I wrong for representing my own views as having the most merit? Maybe, but that’s what it looks like from my perspective. Any follower of any other belief system would find arguments that attest to the fact that theirs is “the right way,” at least for themselves. But, as I’ve pointed out in the beginning of the essay in question, I’m under no illusion that what I presented is some sort of “ultimate truth,” because it doesn’t make any sense to frame anything in those terms that evades classification as thoroughly as spiritual matters. Ultimately, as Daniel Quinn wrote, “there is no ‘one right way’ to live” – but there are definitely wrong ways.

I could write from a position of perfect objectivity, but I’m writing essays, not dissertations and scientific papers. From my perspective, it is perfectly fine to identify with the things and beings we care about and value them higher than other things. I am alright with ruffling a few feathers, especially concerning controversial topics like the ones outlined above.
Some things are, according to Leopold’s Land Ethic, simply wrong, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t point them out and distance ourselves from them, especially since they are positioned on the exact opposite end of the spectrum in question. It’s not a binary, but when directly comparing the two extremes of a spectrum it makes sense to use an “us vs them” dichotomy.

Concluding, we could agree that sometimes it makes sense to carefully create abstract binaries for the purpose of being able to examine certain concepts more easily, but denying the existence of such differences altogether is even more vacuous, which smacks of some postmodernist nonsense.

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Please feel free to voice your opinion in the comments - I highly appreciate any feedback and hope this conversation will continue!

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