Not sure this work is worth a takedown, since I am aware that Jensen is not selling himself as a scientist or anthropologist, but he is certainly selling himself as some kind of cultural soothsayer, and I think his narrative is fairly poisonous. Full disclosure: I picked this book up because I thought I’d agree with it. Sure, the title seemed a little overdramatic, and the subtitle – “The Problem of Civilization” – seemed somewhat simplistic, but overall, I’m someone who normally has plenty to say in criticism of civilization. After reading this book, I will be wary of ever 1) using the word “civilization” when what I really mean is something else, something actually evil, and 2) idealizing “uncivilized” cultures (which I’m not sure actually existed?).
When I was first introduced to Derrick Jensen's works, I was unsettled and angry, navigating my sense of the world by the unshakable feeling that something was horribly wrong with it. I had no evidence or specifics regarding this wrongness, only feeling, which is precisely the mental environment that Jensen's works do well in. Through books, mainly, the wrongness gained shape and texture, and the loneliness from being the only one to see the wrongness was relieved. This is, for the narcissistic truth-seeker, all the relief there is the world: the discovery of brethren, others who are as perceptive as you are. This is exactly the narrative that Jensen plays into with Endgame, and it's the one he seems to be trapped in. It's an adolescent narrative that might jump-start the passion needed to reform civilization, but is not at all complex or nuanced enough to come anywhere close to actually designing that reform.
This narrative wore itself out for me after a couple of years (which I spent mostly nursing that chip on my shoulder, which I'd become so attached to). Returning to Jensen's works, I gagged on the memory of all the self-righteousness, and self-loathing, in which I once wallowed. I agree with Jensen's premise that our current civilization is unsustainable, which you'd think would be all that matters, but while I agreed with this, everything else in the book left me frustrated. Which led me, as a reader, to be bizarrely caught in a position of almost trying to defend civilization, because I was so unwilling to get on board with the kind of broad, heavy-handed smears that Jensen employs in arguing against it.
Going back to the subtitle. "The Problem of Civilization." Problem, singular. Civilization is one big problem, not a series of adaptations, interactions, reactions, families, tribes, and resources. Civilization is, for Jensen, one big thing. Furthermore, all civilizations are the same. Premise 1 of Jensen's vitriolic and highly subjective series of Premises reads: "Civilization is not and can never be sustainable." He does qualify this statement with, "This is especially true for industrial civilization." It seems clear, however, that for Jensen, civilization is industrial civilization. Many of his complaints throughout the book are targeted toward the exploitation of resources characteristic of industrializing: building dams, leveling forests, using sonar to conduct military exercises, raising livestock in factories. On and on. All of which, to be clear, I am absolutely against and agree are entirely unsustainable activities. But not all civilizations, obviously, engage in this kind of exploitation.
Jensen does spend a couple of pages attempting to define what civilization is. According to himself, civilization is “a culture...that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, which cities being defined...as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life” (17). Though the distinction is interesting, I cannot accept this as a useful definition of civilization. The importation of food seems to be, rather, a beginning criteria for industrialization. As Jensen himself points out, civilization also includes political, artistic and social activity, as well as economic activity; many “non-civilized” nations had basic bartering or gift economies (which, again, Jensen isn’t ignorant of since he points it out himself). He fails to heed his own distinctions here, however, and instead lumps all human dynamics into the paradigm of civilization. For example: power, which according to Jensen is “civilization’s other face” – tell me, what human society, civilized or no, does not function on some kind of power dynamic? Or division of labor, which Jensen brings up a sentence or so later. Again, same point: what hunter-gatherer or other “non-civilized” society did or does not function through division of labor? These dynamics are necessary to the behavior that has evolved with our species, and that we need to survive. Sadly, Jensen doesn’t like science, so evolutionary biology is totally ignored, not even given lip service, but I’ll get into that later.
Without a useful set of criteria with which to define civilization, and without fully acknowledging the complexity involved in creating and identifying one, Jensen ploughs angrily ahead. Dude is pissed, and I think that anyone with an environmentalist streak at one point feels the sheer frustration of knowing that all the processes which have kept us alive are so incredibly destructive. However, how much you are willing to identify yourself as one of the destroyers is key to the creation of your own narrative. Jensen more than once acknowledges that he is a human, and thus uses cars and airplanes to get around, shops at a supermarket, etc etc. But there is a total disconnect between this acknowledgment, which is easy enough to make without being totally serious, and the strategies he briefly sketches to get everyone off civilization, the most prominent of which is his idea of taking down cellphone towers. Cellphone towers, which kill thousands of birds every year, seem like a pretty obvious thing to want to destroy: they’re ugly, they seem sort of decadent, meaning something that we could probably live without. Also, they’re often disguised as palm trees, so you’ve got that factor of deceit and denial that is so specially infuriating. So take down the cellphone tower, Jensen, and maybe Ed Norton will play you in a flick. But if you keep going in this direction, what are you going to take down next? The gas station, which is key to your ability to get around? The grocery store, which supplies most of your food?
I’m pretty sure that Jensen would respond that he’d adapt, that he’d be fine not writing books and taking book tours, and would learn to farm. But people just aren’t ready to do this, and expecting to “take down” civilization, I’ve become convinced after reading this book, is incredibly impractical and naïve. Narratives only go forward, not backward, and the same with evolution. We have evolved to live in civilization, for better or for worse, and unfortunately, even if we were to “go back” to a time when we understood our impact on the environment, that process would involve an evolution of what already exists. Which is why I am personally in favor of sustainable development, of which Jensen is certainly not a fan.
But going deeper, this does indeed point to some key psychological issues. Though Jensen’s points about living in civilization being like living through an abusive relationship, where civilization is the abuser, are pretty much incoherent (I appreciate this as a creative idea, but certainly not anything to base policy or large-scale action on), he is right to probe the psychology of the current human living in civilization. All the problems that Jensen is battling in this book are a result of an unclear definition of the human species. What is a human? Are we moral creatures, and if so, what is our morality based on? Jensen’s implicit argument is that we consider ourselves morally responsible only to our own species, which is mostly true, I’d have to say. And the question of how we shift our morality to include other species (as indigenous, “pre-civilized” cultures did) is, I believe, the most interesting question of our time. For some reason, it’s obvious to some that exploiting animals is wrong, and yet for others, it’s obvious that we should dominate animals in every way because we’re “smarter” than them.
Again, Jensen acknowledges the intellectual rationale for this—that morality in this world is relative—but doesn’t really heed this sensible acknowledgment, and doesn’t let its implications reverberate over his entire book. If morality is relative, it’s moldable, changeable. This seems like a really hopeful thing to me, but how does one change morality? How does one make the case that exploiting non-humans is morally wrong? Answering this question requires stepping back and looking at this idea in the first place: why should we want to convince people that exploiting non-humans is morally wrong? Because if they die, we die. Jensen expresses this as the idea of the “landbase,” whose health has to be the focus of all human activity in order for the society to survive. This is absolutely the case, but Jensen fails to make this connection explicit: we need to view non-humans and the landbase not as moral ends in themselves, but because they represent our survival. It’s a shame that Jensen’s book is so incredibly disorganized, because I’m sure this is what his thinking is, but it just isn’t clear. Instead, the moral reasoning that comes through is that civilized humans don’t value their landbase because they are evil, and that is why we should take down civilization.
The other question, about what a human actually is, is obviously one that should be an ongoing discussion. On page 235, Jensen responds to critics (imaginary? I don’t know) who argue that “humans are natural, therefore everything they create is natural.” This gets into a sort of semantic game, as Jensen calls bullshit on this and says that polluted streams and asphalts are “unnatural,” which, okay, in a certain limited sense they may be, but I believe this semantic problem gets at the heart of the issue here. If we are essentially “unnatural,” because we are surrounded by unnatural things that we created ourselves, the narrative is that we have become evil. This has a lot to do with the more everyday self-loathing that comes with thinking that civilization is wrong: on some level, you know it’s you, and the only appropriate response is to get angry.
If Jensen weren’t so dead set against science (which he seems to view only as an institution, not as an activity), he would recognize that evolution hasn’t suddenly transformed us into evil beings, because in nature, there is no evil. There is no natural or unnatural. The word “unnatural” should be taken completely out of the discussion. It creates an unnecessary split, between the supposedly perfect, earth-loving cultures that existed hundreds of years ago, and the ones that exist today. Think about it: birds evolved body parts and brains to be able to pick bugs out of trees and the ground; cats evolved to spot and chase small rodents; whales developed brains that can detect and communicate with undersea vibrations; and humans have likewise evolved to cogitate, to reflect, to have ideas, to use tools and build things. There is nothing we are doing that nature didn't equip us to do. The question that evolution cares about isn't whether a species is evil; it's whether they are successful. Plenty of species have failed; we might be the next one, and evolution would go right on. If there is a case to be made (which of course, there is), it isn’t that we need to take down civilization because it, and we, are evil; it’s that we need to harness those powers that evolution has given us to make our civilization sustainable.
