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ENEMY
of the
State
Mention anarchism and most people think of chaos, mayhem, and bomb- throwing. But for author and social critic John Zerzan, anarchism is not about people running wild in the streets. Rather, it's about eradicating all forms of domination. This includes not only the nation-state and the corporation, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, and homophobia.Jensen: Has a society ever existed in which relationships weren't based on domination?
Zerzan has been tearing at the underpinnings of our culture for twenty-five years now, but he's best known for his most recent books, Elements of Refusal (soon to be reissued by C.A.L. Press) and Future Primitive (Autonomedia). He has also published essays on everything from "Why I Hate Star Trek" to "The Failure of Symbolic Thought." In all his writing, he attempts to expose the ways philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions rationalize domination by making it seem a natural manifesta- tion of Darwinian selection, or God's will, or economic exigency. He encourages us to look at those elements we accept as facts of life and try to see how they, too, facilitate domination. Even more fundamentally, he proposes a relationship between domination and time, number, even language itself.
My conversation with Zerzan, at his home in Eugene, Oregon, was as free-form as I might have expected of a meeting between two anarchists. (Though I call myself an anarchist, I'd never before met one outside the covers of a book.) What I hadn't expected was Zerzan's soft-spoken character. His writing is so sharp, uncompromising, and tenacious that I'd halfway feared he would be as fierce in person as he is on the page. I was pleasantly disappointed: he is one of he most gracious and courteous people I've ever met. I shouldn't have been surprised. Anarchism, as he defines it, is not only the desire to be free of domination, but also the desire not to dominate others.
Julie Mayeda also contributed to this interview.Zerzan: That was the human condition for millions of years. It changed only ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture, which led to civilization. Since that time, we have worked hard to convince ourselves that o such condition ever existed, that we must accept repression and subjugation as necessary antidotes to "evil" human nature. According to this school of thought, authority is a benevolent savior that rescued us from our precivilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance. Think about the images that come to mind when you hear the word cave man or Neanderthal. Those images are first implanted in our minds and then invoked to remind us how miserable we would be without religion, government, and toil. In fact, they are probably the biggest ideological justification for the whole of civilization.
The problem wit those images, of course, is that they are inaccurate. There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication - of animals and ourselves - was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health.Jensen: How do we know this?
Zerzan: In part through observing existing foraging peoples - those few we've not yet eliminated - and watching their egalitarian ways disappear under the pressures of habitat destruction and, often, direct coercion or murder. Also, at the other end of the time scale, through interpreting archaeological finds. For example, studying the hearth sites of ancient peoples, we don't find that one site has most of the goods, while the other sites have very few. Rather, time after time we find that all sites have about the same amount of belongings - evidence of a people whose way of life is based on equality and sharing.
A third source of knowledge is the accounts of early European explorers, who again and again wrote of the generosity and gentleness of the peoples they encountered, all around the globe.Jensen: How do you respond to skeptics who say this is all just "noble savage" nonsense?
Zerzan: I respectfully suggest they read more within the field. This isn't anarchist theory. It's mainstream anthropology and archaeology. There are disagreements about some of the details, but not about the general structure.
Jensen: But what about headhunters and cannibals?
Zerzan: Considering that our culture invented napalm and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure we're in a position to judge the smaller scale violence of other cultures. But it's important to note that none of the cannibal or headhunt- ing groups were true hunter-gatherers. They had already begun to use agri- culture. It is now generally conceded that agriculture usually leads ot a rise in labor, a decrease in sharing, an increase in violence, and a shorter life expec- tancy. This is not to say that all agricultural societies are violent, but rather that violence is by and large not characteristic of true hunter-gatherers.
Jensen: If things were so great before, then why did agriculture begin?
Zerzan: That's a difficult question, one that's long been a source of frustra-
tion for anthropologists and archeologists. For many hundreds of thousands of years - the whole Lower and Middle Paleolithic - there was little change. Then suddenly, in the Upper Paleolithic, there's this explosion, seemingly out of nowhere: all at once there is art, and, on the heels of that, agriculture, then religion.
Some have theorized that the sudden change was due to a growth in intelligence, but we now know that human intelligence a million years ago was equal to what it is today. A recent piece in Nature magazine, for example, suggests that humans have been sailing and navigating around Micronesia, a widespread group of tiny Pacific islands, for some eight hundred thousand years. So the reason civilization didn't arise earlier had nothing to do with intelligence. The intelligence theory has always been a comforting and racist rationalization, anyway: comforting because it implies that anyone intelligent enough will necessarily build a lifestyle like ours, and racist because it implies that those humans who live primitive lifestyles today are simply too stupid to do otherwise. If they were just smart enough, the reasoning goes, they would invent asphalt, chain saws, and penitentiaries.
We also know that the transitions to agriculture didn't come in response to population pressures. Population has always been another big puzzle: how did foragers keep their populations so low when they didn't have birth-control technologies? Historically, it's been assumed they used infanticide, but that theory has been called into question. I believe that, in addition to using various plants as contraceptives, they were also much more in tune with their bodies.Jensen: So why was the human way of life stable for so long, and why did it change so quickly?
Zerzan: I think it was stable because it worked, and I don't think it changed entirely at once. For many millennia there was, perhaps, a slow slippage into division of labor. It would have to have happened so slowly - almost imperceptibly - that people didn't see what they were in danger of losing. The alienation brought about by division of labor - alienation from each other, from the natural world, from our bodies - eventually reached critical mass, giving sudden rise to what we call civilization. As to how civilization itself took hold, I think Sigmund Freud got it right when he said, "Civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion." We see this happening today, and there's no reason to believe it was any different at the start.
Jensen: What's wrong with division of labor?
Zerzan: If your primary goal in life is mass production, then nothing at all. Division of labor is central to our way of life. Each person must perform as a tiny cog in a big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it.
Division of labor is generally seen - when it is noticed at all - as a "given" of modern life. All that we see around us would be completely impossible without it. And that's the trouble: undoing the mess civilization has made will mean undoing division of labor.
I think that, at base, a person is not complete or free insofar as that person's life depends on his or her being just some aspect of a process, some fraction of it. A divided life mirrors the basic divisions in society. Hierarchy, alienation - it all starts there. I don't think anyone would deny that specialists and experts exert effective control in the contemporary world, or that this control is increas- ing with ever-greater acceleration.Jensen: Such as in food production. Every year, fewer corporations control a greater percentage of our food resources. This is possible only because so many of us don't know how to raise our own food.
Zerzan: And it's not just food. Not too long ago, you could make your own radio set. People did it all the time. Ten years ago, you could still work on your own car, but even that's becoming increasingly difficult. So we become more and more hostage to people with specialized skills, and to people who control specialized technologies. When you have to rely too much on others, when you don't have the skills to do what's needed on a day-to-day basis, you are diminished.
Jensen: But isn't it necessary for us to rely on each other?
Zerzan: Of course. The goal of anarchism is not to turn people into islands with no connection to others - quite the opposite. But it's important to understand the difference between the healthy interdependence of a functioning community and the one-way dependence of relying on others with specialized skills for your most basic needs. In the latter case, the specialists have power over you. Whether they are "benevolent" is beside the point.
To stay in control, those who have specialized skills must guard and mystify those skills. The idea is that, without specialists, you'd be completely lost; you wouldn't know how to do the simplest thing, such as feed yourself. Well, humans have been feeding themselves for the past couple of million years, and doing it a lot more successfully and efficiently than we do now. The global food system is insane, inhumane, and inefficient. We destroy the world with pesticides, herbicides, and fossil-fuel emissions, and still billions of people go their entire lives never having enough to eat. Yet few things are simpler than growing or gathering your own food.Jensen: I interviewed a member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the group that last year took over the Japanese ambassador's house in Peru. I asked him what his movement wanted. He replied, "We want to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do it; we merely need to be allowed to do so."
Zerzan: Exactly.
Jensen: In your writing, you've proposed a relationship between time and domination.
Zerzan: Time is an invention of culture. It has no existence outside of culture. The degree to which a culture is ruled by time is a pretty exact measure of its alienation. Look at us. Everything in our lives is measured by time. Time has never been as palpable, as material as it is now.
Jensen: The tick, tick, tick, of a clock is just about as tangible as you can get.
Zerzan: Yes, it makes time concrete; it reifies it. Reification is when an abstract concept is treated as a material thing. A second of time is nothing, and to grant it independent existence runs counter to our experience of life. Anthro- pologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl wrote: "Our idea of time seems to be a natural attribute of the human mind, but that is a delusion. Such an idea scarcely exists where primitive mentality is concerned."
"Primitive" people live in the present, as we all do when we're having fun. It has been said that the Mbuti of southern Africa believe that "by a correct fulfillment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves."
For the North American Pawnee, life has a rhythm but not a progression. Primitive peoples generally have no interest in birthdays or measuring their ages. As for the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire to control nature. They keep track of the seasons, but this in no way robs them of the present. This point of view is hard for us to grasp, because the notion of time has been so deeply imbedded that it's nearly impossible to imagine it not existing.Jensen: So you're talking about more than just not counting seconds.
Zerzan: I'm talking about time not existing. Time as a continuing thread that unravels in an endless progression, linking all events together while remaining independent of them - that doesn't exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. This reification of time is related to the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said: Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. But when you realize that no two occurrences are identical, and that each moment is different from the moment before, time simply disappears. If events are always novel, then not only is routine impossible, but the notion of time is meaningless.
Jensen: And the opposite would be true as well.
Zerzan: Exactly. Without the imposition of time, we can't impose routine. Freud repeatedly pointed out that in order for civilization to take hold, it first had to break the early hold of timeless and nonproductive gratification.
This happened, I believe, in two stages. First, the rise of agriculture magnified the importance of time -- specifically, cyclical time, with its periods of intense labor associated with sowing or reaping, and with the surplus of the harvest allocated to the priests who kept the calendars. This was true of the Babylonians and Mayans. Then, with the rise of civilization, cyclical time --
which at least gave a nod toward the natural world, with it's connection to the rhythms of the seasons -- gave way to linear time. Once you have linear time, you have history, then Progress, then idolatry of the future. Now we're prepared to sacrifice species, cultures, and quite possibly the entire natural world on the alter of some imagined future. Once, it was at least a utopian future, but as a society we don't even have that to believe in anymore.
The same transformation occurs in our personal lives; we give up living in the moment in the hope of being happy at some point in the future -- perhaps after we retire, or maybe even after we die and go to heaven. The emphasis on heaven itself emerges from the unpleasantness of living in linear time.Jensen: It seems to me that linear time not only leads to habitat degrad- ation, but also springs from it. When I was young, there were many frogs. Now there are fewer. There were many songbirds. Now there are fewer. That's linear time.
Zerzan: Yes, and with the introduction of the lock, linear time was transformed into mechanical time. The Christian Church was central to this endeavor. The Benedictines, who ruled forty thousand monasteries at the height in the Middle Ages, helped yoke human endeavor to the unnatural collective rhythm of the machine by forcing people to work "on the clock."
The fourteenth century saw the first public clocks, as well as the division of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds.
At every step of the way, however, time has been met with resistance. In France's July Revolution of 1830, for example, people all across Paris began spontaneously to shoot at public clocks. In the 1960's, many people (including me) quit wearing watches. Even today, children must be broken of their resistance to time. This was one of the primary reasons for the imposition of a mandatory school system on a largely unwilling public: school teaches you to be at a certain place at a certain time, and thus prepares you for life on the job. Raoul Vaneigem, member of the radical group Situationist International, has a wonderful quote about this: "The child's days escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity, passion, dreams haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look on, waiting, watch in hand, till the child joins and fits the cycle of the hours."
