A while back I wrote a critique of Desert on twitter in a thread, but now that I am doing real actual grown-up writing, I decided to gather these thoughts here as a coherent article.
Here is Desert if you wish to read it: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert
In short, Desert is a post-civilisation manifesto, similar in tone to that of Capitalist Realism. The author is anonymous, but is likely from the United States, specifically Seattle. The tone, vernacular, frame of reference and recollection all hint very heavily at Seattle or possibly some other progressive metropolitan region like Portland or California.
To me, this is important to note, because the book itself is very alienated from its subject. In fact, when one is trapped in the city, then it is hard to argue with this alienation, it is without question that the grass is always greener in the woods.
In fact, most people I have known who adhere to postcivilisation ideas are generally either in urban or rural regions, whereupon the urbanisation of capitalist realism is slowly encroaching upon them. The woods, the trees, the moss and the birds become a… and forgive the pun: Natural retreating point.
Problem however is that this is ideology at its finest. The symbolism of the desert is a wonderful metaphor for this. Ideology is to be lost in the wilderness, and always circle back to that profane depiction above: The parliament.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what nature is, and what it affords us. Nature is not austere, nature is abundant. Nature is ripe with resources that demand inquiry, exploration and mastery. Nature punishes inertia, and demands constant change from its many inhabitant. It is a brutal and authoritarian environment, whereupon liberty is found in careful enclosures.
This is not to say that we are at odds with nature, but it is to say that an ecosystem is precisely what it describes; A system.
So what fortuitous circumstance then, that we are the only species endowed with the gift engineering and invention. Postcivilisation assumes that there is a kind of natural pattern, a Platonic essence of nature, wherein we live as a reflection cast upon a mirror, and that by moving outside of is frame; We cease to exist.
Problem is that this frame is the ideology which keeps us inert in the face of a very perverse force: Namely that of the aforementioned depiction. How, precisely, do you actually “rewilden” something? How do you change the world with individualism? How can you produce a new species through free association? The answer is simple: You can’t. It is a logistical impossibility.
Your commune, or local orgaisation is incapable of this. The only way to overcome such an obstacle is through centralisation, to make oneself less local, self-governing is a contradiction that has never been exemplified in history as anything but a losing side of an inevitable war.
In fact, with such foresight, one may very well point an accusing finger at those who would lead desperate and misguided people into a forlorn heap of hopeless radicalism.
Rather it is a thing of the tricolor, that falsest of promises by which the proletariat was viciously cut down during the industrial revolution. The red, white and blue of France, Holland, Britain and the United States. The vulgar banners of slavery, colonialism and imperial war.
Because the very essence of the writing, of the postcivilisation philosophy, is mired within this consciousness. Civilisation itself being premised as a modern invention, unique to these places. A slavetrader’s mythology that has burdened popular consciousness since Christopher Columbus made his first footprint on the beaches of Hispaniola.
Truth is that civilisation is older than recorded history. In China, civilisation has existed for 7.000 years, in India, 8.000. In Sri Lanka, the Vedda people have built Megalithic structures and agricultural settlements dating back as long as 30.000 years.
The European idea of how everyone else was hunter-gatherers is sadly a mistake of sample bias. Europe is a poor continent, with scarce food sources and vast plains. This was an intuitive environment for nomads and gatherers. But in hotter climates with lush and abundant food sources, people settled down very quickly and began to create social orders governed by civics.
And I use Asian regions as an example because they have some of the oldest written records. The Chinese was able to write some 9.000 years ago, making it easy to track human civilisation from its infancy.
But you have similar evidence among aboriginals, natives and first peoples all over the former colonies even if perhaps their presence is recorded in a less direct fashion, in the form of ancient codices, archeological discovery and oral recollection.
In fact, one fascinating example is Hinduism. Hinduism is a very classical religion, like the Hellenics, it is intertwined with its geography. Hinduism is just as much a spiritual matter as a societal one, the reason why it has not spread beyond its historical borders in a pattern similar to universalist religions is not because it is primitive, but to the contrary; It is too sophisticated. It is specifically tailored for the social and cultural norms of Hindu society, which may be typified by India, but also neighboring regions.
Traces of Hinduism date back as early as 12,000 years ago, the proto-religions which would later compound into the modern day idea of Hinduism. In fact, Hinduism, much like Hindi, the language, are both geographic references. It is where the word “India” comes from. Had the Christian faith been structured similarly, we would’ve called it perhaps Jerusalemism, or Nazarenism. This is a very curious divergence, how Hindu consciousness looks at places, and how Christian consciousness looks at names.
This has, through history, clearly influenced the development of their respective theosophies in distinct manners.
Hindi embodies a lot of concepts specific to to Hindu society. Islamic rulers had to adopt to Hindu traditions, not because they opposed Islam, but because Hinduism is just as much civics and social order as it is religion.
It produces governance, civics, society and language, as well as temples, ceremony, faith and ritual. A secular ruler cannot simply remove it, at most you can alter it. The British learned this the hard way.
And this is an undeniable footprint of civilisation, one that strikes right at the heart of the tricolour mythology. It is almost comical to think that the British could bring civilisation to the Hindu people, who had it in such abundance that it exposed the Brits as the true primitives, who, when confronted with this extraordinary sophistication, could think of no baser recourse than to burn and hang the people into submission.
The Japanese, similarly, upon being colonised by the Portuguese, had roads, written language, and national governments, and quickly dismissed these Europeans as barbarians.
It is only in European languages that Europe is recorded as the civilisers of society. In fact, even us Romani, in our Chib language, use the word “Barbarian” in the same way that Jews use the word “Gentile.”
So even those of us who are Europeans who originated from Asia, India in the case of Romani, and Palestine in the case of Jews, also have this in our languages.
I could hammer this point home further with examples from Africa and Latin America, but I think I’ve made it well enough. Generally speaking, as language grows more sophisticated as to permit effective sharing of knowledge, most communal societies become civic ones.
And that’s not to mention that communalism is actually quite unpleasant, there’s a reason why we moved away from it. Communalism doesn’t really afford people with concepts such as privacy, or consent, or personhood. Everyone is kind of trapped in this very incestuous and depersonalised social environment where you have no real identity beyond your own name.
I think a lot of modern day postciv people think communalism is a bit like a Flintstone episode, where you live in your Neolithic themed suburbs with your horse and cart parked in the driveway of your hut. But that’s not how it works.
It’s not just happy tribes with gift economies, especially since those gifts frequently involved things like, say, brides. It’s not very good. There’s a reason why literally everyone decided to look for greener pastures, and it generally came out of higher social abilities, as tribes became clans and clans became nations.
Those of us who come from cultures with a history of arranged marriages are trapped in a bit of a contradiction there, because, yes, idiot reactionary racists will talk about how it was the end of the world, and of course idiot progressive racists will go with the noble savage narrative and say “It wasn’t that bad actually.”
No, selling off a 14 year old child in exchange for a goat is bad, it’s very bad, but it also wasn’t the norm. Arranged marriages were for the most part done by sensible and caring people, and it wasn’t all too terrible in a lot of situations. BUT, it invited people to, on occasion, carry out horrendous abuse to vulnerable children, and that’s why it’s bad.
Same reason normal people marriages were bad during the 1950s when women couldn’t divorce or get their own bank accounts.
And that’s the funny thing, because if anarchists really want to know what communalism feels like then stop rebelling against your parents, instead, obey them without question, no matter how stupid or wrong they are, just obey them without question.
Then you’ll start understanding how a society governed by elders work. Then you’ll start to understand just how communalism became monarchism. To paraphrase Stalin: They are not antipodes, they are twins.
So I think this is a core contradiction in postciv ideas, they ascribe their own often republican and European norms, unto a social order that had no such things. It’s an entirely imaginary kind of thing, you’re not rewildening as it were, you’re not returning things to their natural state, instead you’re just making it up as you go along.
And this postmodern flim flam approach to things returns you to where you began: Parliamentarian capitalism. Because you have no ability in which to leave it, instead you have joined the nebulous impotence of radical controlled opposition to liberalism, in which rhetoric, symbolic gestures and futile protests furnish a theatric of democracy.
But there is actually one example of the slavetrader’s myth, in which we see this pattern of civilising primitives, and it was Scotland. Scottish colonialism is typified by this. People lived in clanhood still, this is a kind of communalism. And this is how the English were capable of colonising them so effectively, because all they had to do was to participate in the natural dialectic in which communalism becomes monarchism, and before you knew it, my great-great-great-great and so on uncle, sat on the throne in Buckingham.
(One branch of my family are Stuarts as it were.)
And this pattern happens all the time, communalism is just the natural course of unifying. Alexander The Great and Romulus are two other examples of this. Communalism is the natural predispose to monarchism. It is not a product of conquest, but rather a product of competition. Every communal order fights for who gets the throne, no one fights to abolish it.
Rather what afforded Rome its republic was philosophy, it was this precise unification into a coherent state that permitted people to exchange languages, customs, inquiry and literature. It was this bastion of debate, authorship and culture that became the beckon call for a republic.
Communalism in its insular and monolithic structure, in which there are no roads into the city, where life is a cycle contained within itself, we see why history slowed down so radically.
Why communal history is measured in millennia, and the history of nations is measured in centuries. Why our own modern history is measured in decades. It all comes from infrastructure being able to accelerate the forces of such a history, that permits advancement in new and radical ways.
This is the great irony of anarchism, in how it is in fact the least radical ideology. It does not merely propose the most infertile of orders, but even one which, if by some magic is realised, may very well kill radicalism for generations to come.
So when I see this resignation, this doomsday prophecy of hopelessness, wherein the only signal is to retreat and lose faith in humanity and society, then I ask why?
Is it not even a far greater and dare I say foolish act of faith to have faith in vulgar cynicism? To have faith in hopelessness? Is this not in fact the greatest of contradictions?
Even by the standards of someone who lives in the Mediterranean, I find it to be excessively Romantic. Many saints have died for faith, but few of them made it seem so very aspirational.
And in this resignation, as Desert basically recommends people to go through the motions of liberal civil disobedience, its spiraled footsteps through the sand has finally delivered it back to the parliament.
As the liberal says: “Let the parliament govern with the support of our votes and campaigns!” the postciv replies: “No! Let the parliament govern with the admonishment of our stones and pickets!”
But neither side disputes that the parliament may govern.
