Beyond the Past: The Primitive Within

            Stanley Diamond’s quote, “Civilization originates with conquest abroad and repression at home,” is often times considered to be his most important, or at least, his most powerful quote which sums up the thesis of anarcho-primitivism.  He does, I believe, have an even more important quote than the first sentence of his book: “the sickness of civilization consists…in its failure to incorporate (and only then to move beyond the limits of) the primitive” (129).

            Perhaps the romanitfication of the idea of the primitive comes not from the exaggeration of the past, but of the application of the past to the future.  Primitivists often project our human past into the future without really considering what it is they are projecting.  The past was the past, and unless we’re willing to move beyond the idea that gatherer-hunter archetypes are our only hope, we are all living up to the ideology of the primitive (merely a rigid framework to fit things into), instead of experiencing the idea of the primitive.

            As so much anthropological work has showed us, and so much primitivist critique has expanded on, that period of history before domestication was a period of anarchy and relative peace.  Unless we are accepting the fact that history repeats itself – and I think most anarchists want to break free from the chains of his-story – then we must appreciate our ancestral connection and then move ahead and beyond.  The period characterizing 99% of our human history is over, and we are now living in a present oppressive time which has allowed some of us to see the limits of both extremes of the human condition, and from that create a world based on the real primitive – not some historical society or some present !Kung tribe, but the internal instinct to live free.

            Need I say why domestication, civilization, hierarchy, the State, etc. – the buffet of ideologies anarchism battles against – must be abolished?  Rewriting what has already been written is not the goal of this essay.  The reasons why these institutions are unnatural and therefore must be destroyed are well laid out in Stanley Diamond’s In Search of the Primitive, John Moore’s A Primitivist Primer, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Against the Megamachine, the Green Anarchy newspaper, and countless others.

            Rarely, however, do anarcho-primitivists point out constraints on the pre-civilization lifestyle.  Beyond mere economics and ecology – which needless to say, were pretty much sustainable – foragers still submitted to different forms of domination – whether supernatural or cultural.  The supernatural, although it explained their world and gave them a connection to the universe – was a dominating force, almost god-like in power, which would often serve as a mechanism of control.  It was a mode of sanctions which kept their society free of other forms of oppression; it kept their society stable and it kept them from destroying the Earth.  Culturally, they had to submit to the sanctions imposed on them by the limits of their culture.  They had to believe the way everyone else believed, and they had to behave as everyone else behaved.  Homogeneity was a rule – and it helped keep their societies stable.

            There is nothing at all wrong with this type of lifestyle.  There is no “perfect” society, and there never will be.  The idea of “perfect” does not exist.  It was the way they knew how to live and survive, and it worked well for them.  It was perfect for that time and that place.  It was a period of unintentional anarchy.  However, if we wish to project the image of the primitive past into the future to establish an intentional anarchy we are starting a project that will never be finished.  Gatherer-hunter lifestyles are all but over (and unless we can stop the civilized killing machine before it destroys those that are left, it is over).  The world is a much different place which can no longer sustain the past primitive nor the present civilization.

                        Being conscious of both civilization and the primitive, we do not have to be dominated by supernatural forces nor authoritarian dictators, and we do not have to be homogenous, which seems to be the goal of both.  Heterogeneity, diversity is the key to being able to live as sustainable and free as possible.  After all, it is diversity, not uniformity, that has allowed the world to survive.

The real idea of the primitive should be something inside us.  Human nature is determined by how humans behave, most notably, how our ancestors behaved.  Our ancestors were anarchists; they were in touch with the natural world, and lived free and sustainable.  This is 99% of human history, and it exists inside of us.  Many people around the world often have the urge to just leave it all and “go primitive,” which is a rather ethnocentric idea because they neither recognize nor appreciate what it is they are truly doing.  Some people are “back to earth” types, while others fight many different manifestations of oppression under different banners (socialism, peace and justice, anarchism…).  And a small few react violently to the modern psychosis created by civilization and its totality.  These are signs of the internal primitive – our human nature – swelling up inside of us, no longer being able to take the crushing weight of civilization – fighting to resurface for a taste of freedom.