Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure

by Daniel Quinn

  The inventor wanted to go on and on in this way, striving for perfect parts, but the engineer refused, saying, “Can't you see that our returns are diminishing here? It's a waste of time to try to make a dysfunctional design work by improving its parts. Bring me a viable design, and I'll guarantee you a device that'll work for years, using parts made from ordinary materials, to ordinary specifications.”

  Why what we've got is unsustainable

  It's a fundamental tenet of our cultural mythology that the only thing wrong with us is that humans are not made well enough. We need to be made of finer materials, to some set of better specifications (provided, perhaps, by greened-up versions of our traditional religions). We just need to be made kinder, gentler, sweeter, more loving, less selfish, more far-sighted, and so on, then everything will be fine. Of course, no one succeeded in making us better last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that—or indeed any year in recorded history—but maybe this year we'll get lucky … or next year or the year after that.

  What I've endeavored to say in all my books is that the flaw in our civilization isn't in the people, it's in the system. It's true that the system has been clanking along for ten thousand years, which is a long time in the timescale of an individual life, but when viewed in the timescale of human history, this episode isn't remarkable for its epic length but for its tragic brevity.

  In Ishmael I compared our civilizational contraption to an aircraft that has been in the air for ten thousand years—but in free fall rather than in flight. If we stay with it, we'll crash with it, and soon. But if most of us lighten its load by abandoning it, it can probably stay in the air for a long time (while the rest of us try something that makes better sense).

  Let's bail out and go over the wall!

  Professor of anthropology James W. Fernandez writes, “Anthropologists, unlike philosophers, find that cultural worlds are brought into being by the performance (enactment) of mixed metaphors.” (Emphasis added.)

  So there. I'm happy to mix a few metaphors in the cause of bringing into being a new cultural world.

  After several hours spent discussing the movement beyond civilization to tribal living, one of the members of my seminar said he still couldn't see how it would serve to make human life more sustainable. We've come a ways since the last time I addressed this issue, so I should probably address it again here. It's a valid and important question. The New Tribal Revolution may give people a better life, but if it doesn't serve to perpetuate our species beyond a few decades, what's the point?

  Right now there are about six billion of us in what I've called the culture of maximum harm. Only ten percent of these six billion are being maximally harmful—are gobbling up resources at top speed, contributing to global warming at top speed, and so on—but the other ninety percent, having nothing better in sight, want only to be like the ten percent. They envy that ten percent and are convinced that living in a way that is maximally harmful is the best way to live of all.

  If we don't give them something better to want, we're doomed.

  A systemic change

  The New Tribal Revolution is an escape route from the prison of our culture. The walls of that prison are economic. That is, the need to make a living keeps us inside, because there's no way to make a living on the other side. We can't employ the Mayan Solution—we can't disappear into a life of ethnic tribalism. But we can disappear into a life of occupational tribalism.

  Will this leave our civilization a smoking ruin? Certainly not. It will diminish it. As more and more people see that going over the wall means getting something better (not “giving up” something), more and more people will abandon the culture of maximum harm—and the more this culture is abandoned, the better. The escape route leads beyond civilization, beyond the thing that, according to our cultural mythology, is humanity's very last invention.

  The escape route leads to humanity's next invention.

  But even so, will this next invention give us a sustainable lifestyle? Here's how I assess this. Humans living in tribes was as ecologically stable as lions living in prides or baboons living in troops. The tribal life wasn't something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success—not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately catastrophic for the earth and for us. When the plane's going down and someone offers you a parachute, you don't demand to see the warranty.

  But why “humanity's” next great adventure?

  In The Story of B and elsewhere I made a great point of establishing the fact that we—the Takers, the people of this culture—are not humanity, and I'll certainly never draw back from that statement. It isn't humanity that is presently converting this planet's biomass into human mass, it's the people of one culture—ours. It isn't humanity that is pressing thousands of species into extinction every year by its expansion, it's the people of one culture—ours.

  Why then do I describe the New Tribal Revolution as “humanity's” next great adventure instead of “our” next great adventure? The answer is simple: civilization was not “our” adventure. As I've pointed out again and again in this book, civilization was an adventure that many peoples embarked upon. “We” weren't the only ones; we were just the only ones who stuck with it to the point of self-immolation. And if civilization wasn't just “our” great adventure, how could the next great adventure be just “ours”?

  The New Tribal Revolution isn't intended to be ours alone— anyone can join who wants to, after all. But neither is it compulsory. The old tribalism with which humanity became humanity is as good as it ever was. It will never wear out or become obsolete. Landing on the moon was a great achievement for humanity, but that doesn't mean all humans have to do it.

  PART SEVEN

  Beyond Civilization

  An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents…. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.

  MAX PLANCK

  Liberation

  During a period when millions were being liquidated as “enemies of the people,” there was a certain “dangerous” poet who was famous for his uncanny ability to avoid Stalin's displeasure. A French journalist sought him out to ask if he'd been silenced under the latest reign of terror.

  “Silenced!” the poet cried indignantly. “I declaim my poetry from the stage of the ________ Theater every Monday night!”

  The journalist made a point of being there the following Monday, only to find the theater dark and locked. He hung around indecisively for a hour, then, as he was about to leave, a side door opened and the poet slipped out into the night.

  “What happened?” the journalist asked him. “I thought you were going to read here tonight.”

  “I did read here tonight,” the poet declared emphatically. “It just so happens that I'm at my best when reading before an empty house.”

  When people say my books have inspired them to “go someplace and start a commune,” I have to wish them the best of luck—and bite back the impulse to tell them this is very far from anything I had in mind. If you can only be free living on a mountaintop or a desert island, then clearly you're something less than free.

  Listening to the children

  Whether by intention or not, suicides often reveal themselves in their choice of means. The guilty hang themselves. Sacrificial victims slash their throats. The discarded throw themselves off buildings or bridges. Tormented minds blow their brains out. Jeffrey in My Ishmael walked into a lake, telling us he'd failed to find his true element. He just couldn't get into his lungs the air others seem to breathe so easily.

  I've talked about Jeffrey (or his real-life prototype, Paul Eppinger) to many audiences, always with the feeling that I haven't made my point, which is that he wasn't extraordinary. He's to be found ever
ywhere among our children—if only we'll start listening. I don't just mean listening to their words—they may not have the words. Listen to the stories they tell with their gestures of profound alienation and despair, the stories of pandemic suicide, of drug use among younger and younger children every year, of mind-boggling acts of violence committed by round-faced teens against their families and friends. Listen to their words as well, of course, but never forget that they've been schooled to say what people want to hear; the mass murderers among them are almost always remembered as nice, polite youngsters.

  I know I've failed to make myself understood when people tell me Jeffrey “should have gone to a commune.” This idea represents a profound misunderstanding of where the space of our freedom is to be discovered.

  The Littleton bloodbath

  The previous page was written half a year before the mindboggling act of violence committed on “Free Cookie Day,” April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where fifteen died in half as many minutes. Even though the perpetrators of this massacre were two intensely unpopular boys, one classmate afterward managed to remember at least one of them as nice.

  I was unpopular at my own high school—not quite as unpopular as those two, but I dealt with it the same way, by flouting it and even perversely cultivating it. I too had an accomplice, achieving some “solidarity in exclusion.” Both of us resorted to violence on occasion, but of course we didn't dream of assassinating hundreds, dynamiting the school, and crashing an airplane into a city block.

  Things were different then, almost half a century ago—not that they were “good old days.” We were never allowed to forget that one wrong word or one insane moment could trigger a nuclear holocaust that would leave our world a smoking ruin. But if that didn't happen, we two faced a future of literally unlimited promise. No one had as yet realized we were in the process of making the earth uninhabitable. No one had as yet doubted that we could go on living exactly this way forever. So we had hope—bushels, acres, and tons of hope. We had a way to go that we knew would work. We had choices. We didn't doubt for a moment that we could do anything we really wanted to do, because everything was just going to go on exactly this way, getting better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better … forever.

  Listening to the monsters

  Would Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have become “the monsters next door” (as Time magazine dubbed them) if they'd had another way to go? At school they were harassed as “dirtbags” and “faggots” and pummeled with bottles and rocks thrown from classmates' passing cars. Did they go there because they wanted this abuse? No, we understand perfectly well why they went there: they had no choice in the matter. They “had” to go, compelled by law and social pressure. If they'd had another way to go, they would have disappeared from Columbine long before their only dream became a dream of vengeance and suicide.

  Would brain scans have revealed they were “genetically inclined to violence?” Perhaps so, and so what? A brain scan might reveal the same about me. Remind me to tell you about the time I came within a split second of killing a man with my bare hands, a catastrophe only averted by the narrowest margin of good luck for us both. Being “genetically inclined to violence” doesn't doom you to becoming a mass murderer—but having no hope may do just that. Frankenstein's creature only became a monster when he saw he could never be anything else.

  It's estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom-assassins have killed two in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Arkansas, and thirteen in Colorado. Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in years to come—unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.

  A cultural space of our own

  People who are reluctant to spend their lives building some pharaoh's pyramid all have a common need, but the need is felt most acutely by the young, who are the real pack-animals of the operation. Sixty years ago raw graduates took jobs in factories, where they could at least expect to climb the same ladder of advancement as their parents. In the postindustrial age young people (as James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar point out) are becoming increasingly ghettoized in retail and service sectors, where they endlessly lift and carry, stock shelves, push brooms, bag groceries, and flip burgers, gaining no skills and seeing no path of advancement ahead of them.

  For them and for us, it isn't geographical space we want, it's cultural space. Carlos, who made his home under a grate in Riverside Park, knew that a certain kind of freedom comes with living in a hole. But he also knew it isn't “real freedom” if you have to live in a hole to get it. He wanted the kind of freedom people have when they live where they please and don't have to resort to a hole, even in “the scenic Ozarks” or “the foothills of Kentucky.” He wanted a whole world's worth of freedom—and so do most of us, I think. To get that, we'll have to take the world back from the pharaohs. It won't be hard. They're not expecting it—but even if they were, they'd be helpless to stop it.

  Why things didn't end up a-changin'

  Lots of songs about revolution came out during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, but the revolution itself never materialized, because it didn't occur to the revolutionaries that they had to come up with a revolutionary way of making a living. Their signature contribution was starting communes—a hot new idea from the same folks who gave us powdered wigs.

  When the money ran out and parents got fed up, the kids looked around and saw nothing to do but line up for jobs at the quarries. Before long, they were dragging stones up to the same pyramids their parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents had been working on for centuries.

  This time it'll be different. It'd better be.

  Another story to be in

  As developed in Ishmael, the “story” we're enacting in our culture is this: The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it; and under Man's rule, the world might have become a paradise except for the fact that he's fundamentally and irremediably flawed. This story— itself mythology—is the foundation for all our cultural mythology, and I said in Ishmael that it isn't possible for people simply to give up living in such a story. They must have another story to be in.

  It didn't occur to me when I wrote these words that people might imagine this “other” story to be a brand-new fabrication that I or some panel of mythologists was going to sit down and conjure up out of nothing, but of course a few did. But oddly enough, when challenged to articulate this other story, which I'd described as having been enacted here during the first three million years of human life, I found I couldn't do it in any very convincing fashion. This was because I was trying to formulate it in a way that was parallel to ours, point by point. I failed to realize for a good long time that the other story was much simpler (much more “primitive”) than ours—and that I'd already articulated it. To my mind it's the most beautiful story ever told.

  There is no one right way for people to live.

  No one right way

  Once you recognize it, it's perfectly clear that this is the story that was enacted here during the first three or four million years of human life. Of course, there's a clear sense in which ours is just a special case of a much wider story, written in the living community itself from the beginning, some five billion years ago: There is no one right way for ANYTHING to live.

  No one right way to hinge a jaw.

  No one right way to build a nest.

  No one right way to design an eye.

  No one right way to move underwater.

  No one right way to breed.

  No one right way to bear young.

  No one right way to shape a wing.

  No one right way to attack your prey.

  No one right way to defend yourself against attack.

  This is how we humans got from there to here, by
enacting this story, and it worked sensationally well until about ten thousand years ago, when one very odd culture sprang into being obsessed with the notion that there must be a single right way for people to live—and indeed a single right way to do almost anything.

  Gotcha this way!

  But these words will hardly be taken in before some wiseacre thinks to ask: “But aren't you saying, Mr. Quinn, that the tribal way is the right way for people to live?”

  I'm saying nothing of the kind. As I noted above, the gifts of natural selection aren't perfect (much less “right”), but they're damned hard to improve on. The tribal way isn't the right way, it's just a way that worked for millions of years, in contrast to the hierarchal way, which has brought us face to face with extinction after a mere ten thousand years.

  For all I know, the tribal way may in the future be superceded by some other way that works better for us in circumstances that are obviously going to be very different from those of the past. In fact, isn't that exactly what I'm proposing in these pages? After all, I'm not suggesting we return to the tribal way as it was known here during the first three million years of human life—or as it's still known among surviving aboriginal peoples. Old-style ethnic tribalism is, for the foreseeable future, utterly out of reach for us.

  The tribalism of the New Tribal Revolution isn't proposed as an end—as something right and to be clung to at any cost—it's proposed as a beginning, at a time when we must either make a new beginning or reconcile ourselves to joining the dinosaurs in the very near future.