A People’s History of Civilization

by John Zerzan (2018, Feral House, 311 pages)

Synopsis:

The transition from forager to farmer, the move toward domestication of plants and animals — and ourselves — was the most deeply qualitative shift in the history of our species. It changed everything and continues to do so. Control and productivity emerged as the defining principles.

Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects.

Counterposing “wild vs. domesticated” and “weeds vs. crops” — speaks of the duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment that characterize high civilization over the millennia of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine.

When, for the sake of agricultural production, we clear the land of trees, “weeds,” and “pests,” we are being all too human (anthropocentric). “To level off, to standardize the landscape, to efface its irregularities and banish its surprises,” these words of E.M. Cioran apply to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as mainly sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of separated life. Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception. In domesticating animals and plants humanity necessarily domesticated itself.