Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966775805 ISBN 13: 9780966775808

Publisher: Uncivilized Books, 1999

Synopsis

From Hesiod on through to the "primitivists" of today, by way of Rousseau, William Morris, and Fourier, among others51 selections in all. Here's a reader that throws light on the inner logic of civilization and its devouring course. In these times of desolation for individual, society, and biosphere alike, such a collection (including commentaries by Zerzan) is urgently needed. Why does every culture have its longing for a lost Golden Age? How have History and Progress brought us such vast separation and emptiness, such a sense of no future? Is it civilization itself that has brought us here? Schiller, Paul Shepard, Kirkpatrick Sale, Fourier, Perlman, Sahlins, Bahro, Zerzan, the Unabomber, etc. etc.visionaries and theorists exposing the foundations of today's crisis.

About this title

About the Author

John Zerzan wrote Elements of Refusal (1988, 1999) and Future Primitive (1994), and co-edited, with Alice Carnes, Questioning Technology (1988, 1991). Forthcoming (1999) is a collection of recent essays, Running on Emptiness.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword The thing I admire about Chicano village life in New Mexico is that beneath the sleek overlay of trucks and telephones lies the still-vital infrastructure of an ancient and, until recently, undisturbed way of life. Men hunt elk and turkey. Women know plants. Curandera-healers with their potent prophetic powers live among us. Everyone knows how to build a mud house, dig the irrigation ditch, grow corn, ride a horse, and navigate through the forest on a moon-lit night. And despite the raging poverty that universally flattens land-based communities when they are conquered, colonized, and consumed, there is more happiness here than in any place I have known. It's a simple happiness, nothing fancy, a here-and-now contentment: a story told at the gas pump, an invitation to go fishing, a twist of language that illuminates the irony of history. Living here, I have learned not to contemplate a trip to the dump or the village store without carrying with me an extra twenty minutes, or an hour, to give and receive.

Such experiences reinforce what, after decades of research and dozens of social-change movements, I have long suspected. That it is not just contemporary industrial society that is dysfunctional; it is civilization itself. That we humans are born to be creatures of the land and the sea and the stars; that we are relations to the animals, cohorts to the plants. And that our well-being, and the well being of the very planet, depend on our pursuance of our given place within the natural world.

It is against these musings that I celebrate the coming of John Zerzan's accomplishment of an anthology harboring the best of civilized people's critiques of civilization. Herein the reader will discover the questions that need to be asked and the insights that beg to be nurtured if humankind and the natural world as we know it are to thrive into the future.

This book is that important.

Chellis Glendinning Chimay--, New Mexico 26 July 1998

Edition details

• Publisher: Uncivilized Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0966775805
• ISBN 13: 9780966775808
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 215
• Editor: Zerzan John