We use the word “civilization” a lot here. But what does it really mean??
Second question: what do you make of “green” and other eco-friendly movements (especially eco-friendly consumer goods and the “greening” of corporations)? Are these trends a signal that people are moving away from civilized thinking? Or are they ultimately futile efforts (as they are married to consumerism and corporatism)?
Well, I’ll go first. 
The face of civilized culture has changed over the years, but I’ll try to describe what I see as its essence. I think that what it boils down to is “mass society.” It amasses itself by taking those things that lie outside of it and forcibly converting those things to its purposes (this is where hierarchy comes in … in order to justify conversion, people have to believe that there is a chain of command from the top, those who are more deserving, to the bottom, those who deserve less). If something can’t be converted, civilization wants it to cease to exist. Civilization wants everything in existence to be useful to the mass society. “Everything” refers to the natural world, of course, but it also refers to people (groups of people still living outside the society, as well as people born into the society who have not “learned” how to be civilized yet).
The green movement … it’s hard to tell what its influence is. On one hand, it gets people to recognize eco-friendly purchases as a viable option. On the other hand, it placates people into thinking that buying the right products fulfills their responsibility (their identities remain as consumers). There is also the issue of buying green not from a core value but from pretensions of intellectual or social elitism.
Civilization to me is a promise, an unfulfillable promise. I believe in big and small societies, I have visions from time to time how ecosystem food production supported the Mayan, Incan, and Hopewell ways of life, until they were decimated by smallpox.
I think civilized is what someone wants someone else to be.
I do make the mistake of calling ‘society’ ‘civilization’ all the time. Thanks for the chance to reflect!
Tony
Ai think a diciding factor for people choosing to become civilized was the wymyn: agriculture promised that they would never have to sacrifice a child for the sake of the community. What they werent told waz that all the children they had would be mentally or physically handycapped, malnourished, and or realllllly frustrated with their life and develup manic depression. Once the cycle set in and the traditions of Old European peoples wer destroyed by the work-ethic-and-warior culture, cultural amnesia set in, giving rise to (among other things) the thought among modern funtamentalist christians that the entirity of existence is only a few thousand years old. And thats just the tip o the aice-berg…
As for “green” -ers: yeah, just another consumerist ploy. Though, that has made it easyer to get relativly good food, for those of us hu want it.
Late last summer, a friend of mine told me that Sartre said that the self was an act of negation – saying that this and this and this are not-me. I can’t vouch for whether Sartre said that or what the context was, but it got me thinking. Throughout the fall I came to think more and more of civilization as being the artifice created by humans who want to create a reality that reflects this illusory division between humans and “nature.” I think any society that acts on the notion of this fundamental disconnection reflects “civilization” to me. Perhaps this is too simplistic in trying to extrapolate a pathology into a six-thousand year endeavor, but I like it.
I think in the present context, remembering not only that we are animals, but, at heart, wild animals is fairly radical because it requires more than just buying eco-friendly products and showering less (this isn’t meant to criticize anyone – I do this!), though those can be a start. But I don’t think those will “save us” so long as they reinforce the notion that we’re not wild animals.
Thanks to many a frames of references, background experiences, perceptions, minds, ideas, views, peoples, non-humans, visions, experiments, stories, etc, probably…
mass ignorantly blissfull unmeaning and meaning selfish self-indulgencey
frenzied nympholepsy
“totalitarian agricultureâ€Â
exponential growth
hierarchy
self defeating
finite
friends
family
pets
cages and keys
colonize (of the sense of disrespectfully taking over another’s territory for one’s own selfish use)
higher chance of possible falsehoods
unsustainable
reasonably abandonable and hatable
another brother (and sister) of the community of life
genocide
instances of reading and living the Law of Death
long term unreliability
human habitat and culture unhealthiness, atrophy, destroyer, limiter, maiming, vandalize, and collapse.
the most likely downfall and total self annihilation/suicide of “Taker†kind, the extinction of “Levers†and billion upon billions of other life forms (species, minerals, etc) of the neighborhood of life.
the most difficult and unsatisfiable holiday, ceremony, business country side invent event
failure supporting and harsh future death planning to its own members and to many by standard such as those I said above, “other life forms and “Leaversâ€Â.â€Â
sickeningly boring sometimes…most of the time 
and hardest work ever and hard to grasp. Oh yeah, and don’t panic, practice patience, go team bond, a-hole, and more probably. Most likely like what a friend called out at a session, “I donno, I just want to have fun.” I’ll never forget those words.
Put that way, to me, green = (means) another “Taker” meme program brought to us by the “Taker Mother Culture” which will not get my trust and direct support for now if I have anything to do with it.
1: Chaos and uncertainty frighten those who cannot embrace loss. The frightened seek security and in doing so, as the species continues to experiment, find increasingly effective ways to exploit and control for their own profit. Eventually this system conquers and brings about a society in which nearly everyone within that society lives in fear and ignorance, disconnected from their humanity and rabidly proliferating. Viola, civilization.
2: I’d much rather choose the lesser of harms. Wouldn’t we all? All the same, I don’t give a damn about anything anyone tries to sell me, no matter what the color. The green looks very pale to me.
A new collection of friendlier products doesn’t hold a candle to a new education, and without eye-opening, liberating education the civilized mindset will keep it’s crippling claws dug deep.
Any society with permanent groups where every one doesn’t make eye contact with the alpha male AND female every day they are not out on excursion.
Worth a look:
Silver Arrow,
You’re a hunter; you seek the heart of your prey.
Misconceptions is the right forum to uncover our common misunderstanding of Civilization .
Civilization, as merely the growth of towns and cities, does NOT begin to adequately describe our primitive, fear-driven Regression back to a simple fight-or-flight dualism where we remain fixated on object-subject separation, and where, in our subjective separation, we continuously objectify every experience and every relationship through-out life.
Through millions of years of evolution we had progressed to a highly evolved cooperative egalitarianism.
Where for hundreds of thousands of years we lived in an advanced Wholistic (rather than dualistic), Existential, psycho-dynamic, where we were alive to the intimate, existentially subjective experience of our own skin, of our own breath.
But now, our Regressed, duality fixated psyches can NO longer achieve an egalitarian cooperation, but have devolved back down to a continual, primitive existence of fear-driven competition.
Now, by objectifing our competition, our inflated subjective-ego can now justify the use of deception as its most effective reproductive weapon in the hyper-competition within our Primate Sexual Hierarchy.
This devolutionary, psycho-dynamic Regression is what we so simplistically call Civilization…
And that ubiquitous misconception leads us to another.
Where the advanced Wholistic dynamic that we lived before our Regression is what everyone, everywhere, including this website, insists on calling Primitive!
Another misconception.
All animals that suffer seek release from that suffering and will ultimately seek release through suicide.
The pathos (suffering) of our current psycho-dynamic is the root of the universal Death-Drive (thanatos) of Civilization’s funeral-march.
Green-Thinking will not save us, yet, despite all its apparent contradictions, under our difficult psycho-dynamic circumstanses that does not make it any less noble for the effort.
Enslavement by people pretending to be liberation from animals.
If it comes in a box with a slogan, it makes people lazy. Oh, the world isn’t going to end, I just need a hybrid. The best way to drive people to the left is to have a right wing situation. Note that hippies lived under Nixon, and the biggest rally in Australia in decades was at APEC under Howard. Of course, after having a right wing situation change (in this case into a centre-right situation with a small taste of social leftism)was still hugely relieving, but obviously no matter where there’s heirarchy, there’s bull shit.
If we want grass roots to grow, we need to plant grass roots.
hoodie, may I ask if you are an arts lit major? that sounds like the way my arts lit friends discuss Freud (which often differs from the way psych students discuss freud e.g. jokes about his mama’s ass, and so forth).
Do you think Eros comes into conflict with Thanatos on a sociological scale during periods of unsustainable population levels? And is this only the case in civilised societies?
Through the existential intimacy of my own subjective experiences in this life is how i read Freud and Jung.
That’s a must for serious arts lit majors, but considered dangerous for most psych students.
Eros (sex-drive) and Thanatos (death-drive) fuel each other in such stressful periods.
“Sex is the Little Death”, as the French say- i see Eros and Thanatos as two sides of the same thermo-dynamic coin.
Both are unconscious impulses striving for release from repressed and unbalanced psycho-sexual energy.
With Eros, we release ourselves into an orgasmic intimacy with the life-force.
With Thanatos, we release ourselves into a similar orgasmic intimacy with death-and so our attraction to combat, danger, and eventually suicide.
In thermo-dynamics, energy seeks to rest in equilibrium.
And, the energy within our psyche (appr. 6% of total caloric-energy) is no different.
When stress induced preoccupations imbalance our psycho-sexual energy into a neurotic dynamic, we are forced by the thermo-dynamic laws of physics to compensate, and seek release by embracing more feverishly the release mechanisms of sex and death.
And any society that develops un-sustainable population levels is already trapped in this dynamic, and, is either already civilized, or so far imbalanced that they soon will be.
ps You might find my posts in the Rewild vs.Repent thread of the Civilizations Collapse forum similar in theme.
Coming at Freud from ANY angle is dangerous. The guy was delusional and ALL of his psychological work was discredited long ago. His most famous assertions, that children inherently want to have sex with their parents, was his way of Denying the abuse claims of his patients. Jung’s stuff is less creepy but still just as unsupportable. But they make for fascinating story, so they continue to be used as explanations for people’s actions whenever accuracy is less important than drama.
Actually, all of Freud’s work hasn’t been discredited. Just most of it. He did contribute some extremely valuable ideas that are still in use, most notably the idea of defense mechanisms. Batty as Freud might have been, he did do a little good.
I’d mostly stay away from it though… if you want to see the effects of Freud watch Century of the Self.
I think Freud opens up doors that were closed before. Jung takes this and opens up more. I think Jung in particular helped open the “Enlightenment” mind of skepticism back open to listening to the mythic realms of night and dream.
I am going to leapfrog Freud knowing people will return to it.
Civilization, in my humble, is as inevitable as rewilding. They look like phases in a single process. Like-minds fecund with the passion to do better, to hone, to connect more fully, to establish a mission, to assert individual recources for something more than the individual. A collaboration of sorts that unfortunately historically becomes too complex to manage.
But at the heart, a bulk of these ambitions seem to come from very basal genetic derivitives of survival including mate acquisition tactics. These are the built-in factors that get us through the hard times, but create copious mounds of melodrama when times are less inherently dangerous. We need the warrior genes and yet we suffer under their spell. It’s a byproduct model. Much like smog, much like we all consume, and we all take a shit.
The things that help us, fuck us when the context shifts. And evolution is too slow these days to have us appreciate enmass a decent quality of life. Survival is too rudimentary to take into consideration quality of life–‘r-k’ theory supposes reproduction tactics exist in a dimension across species between extremes of pumping out maximal numbers of offspring in order to play the survival odds game to rearing few to one offspring carefully, diligently, comittedly. But the survival instinct has no ‘quality of life’ injunction. It is survival, not comfort that operates.
That’s where spirit comes in. Who wants to be so formulaic. It’s clear that science explains, but our meandering away from what we know as provenly healthful (salubrious) suggests we need more. We’re a cross between intense individual intellect and skydiving ‘leave your thoughts at the door’ abandon, yet we long for neither at the end of the day, we just want to fade into it all, disappearing into an ineffable bliss. At least I do.
Somehow, it always gets out of focus. Religions come and go, probably not because they aren’t based on something authentic, but because they get out of focus as slowly the flavor of the original tenets are forgotten as long periods of comfort beget an ugly and ineffectual breed of complacency. A ‘who gives a shit’ mentality pervades. And that indeed becomes a good question. And some embrace of what is dark in us is warranted. I want to accept more of the dark and be less turned off by it. The reality of it is certainly there–no real reward in making a white elephant of it.
What of it? I don’t have an answer. My angst with life is guiding me to ask and say all of this.
Yup. I agree.
The things that helped me get through high school were to my detriment when I entered college.
Luckily, the context can shift in both directions. I think that a large part of rewilding is choosing your own context. Or at least knowing what context you want, even if you don’t have it yet (or ever).
Regarding Freud: all I have to say is that the guy wasn’t totally wacko, just mostly. I pick and choose what feels helpful to me.
[quote=“SilverArrow, post:19, topic:597”][quote author=archazi link=topic=639.msg8359#msg8359 date=1203489690]
The things that help us, fuck us when the context shifts.
[/quote]
I think that a large part of rewilding is choosing your own context. Or at least knowing what context you want, even if you don’t have it yet (or ever).[/quote]
I appreciate this a lot. It implies a great many things that if played out in act, yields hope more palpable than wishful thinking. I don’t wish for anything usually, given birthday candles or when I see the 11:11 mark, the variables are so many and their effects complicated through and through…
I don’t know what to wish for.
But moving toward the context that feels best is something real. I guess we do it subconsciously a lot, but re-reading it here helps plenty. Its like a very important memo. We know it, but it slips out of focus all the time, and the little yellow stick-it becomes a framed historic parchment not sold in any store, something you normally pay admission to see.
Yay and thank you.