Vernacular Space and the Crisis of Modernity

Err...which is to say, MY crisis of modernity...

So, you know that theory that claims that any conversation about morality that goes on for long enough will inevitably turn to Hitler and/or Nazis? (This is apparently known as Godwin's Law. I had no idea it had an actual name.) And its offshoot rule that whoever eventually brings up Hitler and/or Nazis, whether drawing well-supported or baseless parallels in order to make a point, automatically loses? I've often remarked that the same sort of law applies to my own arguments in such conversations, only instead of Hitler/Nazis, it's pre-modern/hunter-gatherer societies. Questions like Is abortion morally acceptable? and Is war ever just? and What's the best way to get rid of this bunion on my foot? are invariably reduced to a matter of how such an issue would fit into a pre-modern context (I think I need a "WWPMSD?" bracelet), and what that says about modern culture, which is usually something bad.

I'll admit to having anarcho-primitivist leanings, which is something I generally won't discuss in polite company, though I will insist, if pressed, that I've come to such a place through a totally infallible train of logic: homo sapiens was a nomadic hunter-gatherer species for about 90% of its evolutionary history (prior to the advent of agriculture and sedentary communities about 12,000 years ago), and for countless millennia before that as a pre-human primate species; therefore, if our DNA disposes us towards certain biological, mental, emotional, and/or social conditions, they are almost certainly still largely based on prehistoric conditions and are only in sync with more recent (i.e. since about 10,000 BCE) ways of life insofar as agricultural lifestyles have managed to mimic particular conditions of homo sapiens' prehistoric space. (There are clear exceptions to this, such as the gene that enables humans to continue to digest milk into adulthood, which evolved as we began to domesticate dairy animals, but in general I think this is true, particularly when it comes to genes that don't confer an evolutionary benefit quite as straightforward as that of lactose tolerance.) In my way of theorizing, our lifestyle's incompatibility with our evolved needs—particularly our social, mental, and emotional ones—is increasingly a problem the more "modern" we become; the lifestyle of the average person alive in, say, 1800 CE was a far cry from the average person alive in 18,000 BCE, but the lifestyle of the average person alive today, at least in the industrialized world, is arguably much more different from that of someone alive 200 years ago than that person's lifestyle was from that of her hunter-gatherer predecessor of 20 millennia past.

Which makes me wonder: what about our lifestyles has changed in these last 12,000 years, and especially in these last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, that causes us to live in ways that are contrary to or physical and emotional well-being? Pollution? Poor nutrition? Stress? Exposure to toxic substances? What about our insistence on dividing the day into 24 hour-long segments, where we eat at certain times and go to bed at other times and wake up at still other times, all without any reference to our own biological needs? Or our insistence, in the industrialized world, upon living in nuclear family units, without the benefit of extended family members to help with the child-rearing and household work, not to mention teach essential skills and impart wisdom? I could go on (and on and on and on and on and on....). Which all begs the question of the extent to which we can attribute Today's Big Issues—widespread violence, systemic poverty, "diseases of affluence", etc.—to homo sapiens living in ways that are contrary to their evolved needs.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I will always, always, ALWAYS take conversations in this direction...but this doesn't mean that to do such is always logically sound, which is something I often lose sight of. For this reason, I've joked about applying the same sort of categorical ban on conversations deviating toward pre-modern/hunter-gatherer culture as Godwin's Law places on conversations that end up discussing Hitler and Nazis. And so my REAL point here is that I'm about to violate this ban. Because I read something interesting in a book, and I want to share it with you. But I will re-enact the ban as soon as I've done so, I promise.

So.

This is coming up now because I'm having somewhat of a motivational crisis in my life. I've settled on a research topic for my graduate degree that I actually quite like, which is a step in the right direction, but beyond that I'm having trouble getting motivated to do most tasks related to school, research, the things that pay my bills, and the things that will supposedly put me in good standing to have a prestigious, if demanding, career sometime down the road (which I'm beginning to suspect I don't actually want anyway). I find myself increasingly swayed by daydreams of finally buying that farm and building that yurt and engaging in my own survival in a way that will produce, if nothing else, an authentic interest in the work that consumes my days. I haven't spent too much time musing over why I'm feeling so darn undermotivated right now, because I've definitely been here before, a good number of times, and while I've come up with many answers over the years, none of them has helped me put a roof over my head or food on the table in a more mentally- and emotionally-engaging manner, so lately I've quit wondering why and begun focusing on how to escape the grind.

But today while flipping through a book on postdevelopment theory, I came across a piece on why traditional (or as the author called them, "vernacular") societies often resist development.¹ This piece contends that these vernacular societies necessarily see new ways of doing things as potentially dangerous because their own ways of doing things have evolved in close relation to one another, and are interrelated in ways and to an extent that those of us living in modern, industrialized contexts could never imagine, and that since historically there have often been consequences to stepping outside of these interrelated customs, technologies, etc. (e.g. death from starvation, getting mauled by lions...), communities have thus evolved protective norms in the form of resistance to outside influence. As the author puts it, "[Vernacular societies] have a certain organic consistency: in other words, their structures are living tissue of social and cultural relations defining the activities of their members and protecting them against possible dangers."²

I've often observed (to myself, and probably to anyone who'd listen) how in modern society, we tend to compartmentalize the different areas of our lives and treat them as separate pieces with no bearing on each other, and how this is probably bad and leads to alienation, depression, ennui, and other negative stuff like that, and how this is probably partially responsible for a lot of the bad stuff going on in the world today. But it never occurred to me to view synergy between a culture's beliefs and lifestyles as a natural feature of the pre-modern world, and thus, a natural psychological, emotional, and social condition of the world in which the vast majority of our evolution has taken place. And so I want to explore what this means for the modern world, which is why I had to postpone my categorical ban.

The implication of such a holistic way of life is that thinking and doing go hand in hand—one would never engage in an activity that didn't make sense within the context of one's beliefs, emotional and physical needs, etc., because these things are intimately tied to the culture, customs, and norms of the society. Someone in a vernacular society would never, for example, sport-kill the game animals upon which they depend for food, or build a house so large it consumes all the trees upon which they depend for fuel. This is clearly in strong contrast to modern life, in which most of us often find ourselves in positions where we are forced or otherwise compelled to act in ways that go against our beliefs, values, or needs, whether for reasons related to work, conspicuous consumption, or just the lack of available alternatives. So what does it mean for us, when we divorce thinking and doing to such a great extent?

The first thing that springs to mind is that if thinking and doing are traditionally such intimately-related activities, it should not come as a surprise that doing without thinking proves especially difficult; that is, when we're forced to engage in activities that don't jive with our inner conceptions of value, justice, morality, etc., we find ourselves unmotivated (and possibly alienated, depressed, etc. as well). I can no sooner find fulfillment by doing work I find meaningless than I can by becoming a devotee of a religion I don't actually believe is true. It's always a little alarming to me when I make connections like this, that should have been perfectly obvious all along. In the past, I've come up with all manner of explanations for why I've never actually had a job that I liked, from Marxist notions of labor as an exploitative process, to the realization that I just don't like stuff enough to make it worth all the work it takes to buy it, to depressing treatises on the sad realities of cubicle farms and the horrors of fluorescent lighting. And though all of these things do, of course, factor into my distaste for past jobs, I've suddenly discovered the link that seems to tie them all together, which is that I just don't believe in the processes driving them. I mean, presumably, if I actually wanted a house in the suburbs and an SUV and yearly vacations in Hawaii, I'd be less put-off by the cubicles and fluorescent lighting, because I'd have accepted them as part of the process of obtaining something I considered valuable. I assume that this is why most people tend to accept these things to some extent—they believe that there is value somewhere along the way, even if it's just in the end result of being able to provide a stable, comfortable life for themselves and their families. But I'm really not all that driven by these things, and I believe that stability and comfort can be achieved in much more fulfilling ways, and what's more, I'm deeply troubled by the world that's being created as a result of this way of living. And since basically every job I've ever had has forced me to engage, to a fairly large extent, in the processes creating this way of living, I've done a whole lot of doing without thinking, which, as we've established, is sad, difficult, uphill work. Oh, the trauma of being an anarcho-primitivist in the modern world.

Oh man, but it's so much worse than that too. I'm a pretty analytical person. I deconstruct the hell out of everything. It's like this compulsion, something my brain does when idle, like when I'm on the john and forgot to bring a book. And as a result, I can, and do, find dumb stuff in EVERYTHING, which makes it difficult to believe wholeheartedly in the processes generating or purposes served by pretty much anything. I've been hiding myself away in grad school for the past two plus years because it turns out that I believe in what goes on there more than I believe in what goes on in most other paycheck-giving sectors of society, but that doesn't mean it's not without its issues (more on this some other time). I'm really worried that I'll never be able to find a way to spend my working hours that doesn't leave me feeling numb and vaguely violated in some way. This is probably why I've always been so obsessed with the idea of having a farm and growing my own food—I theorize that if the thing at stake compelling me to work was my own actual survival, I'd at least be interested in that, if only because my biological self-preservation instinct made me be so. And once I got that down, I could experiment with adding other things back into my life and seeing how they fit, to try find a way I could live and work without feeling so numb about things, kind of like those diets they put people with severe allergies on, where they can only eat, like, oatmeal for a month, and then gradually add other foods back in to see how they jive. (Please spare me the lectures on how farming is hard and subsistence agriculture is a miserable way to get by and is practically impossible for someone raised in a cushy industrialized nation; I know these things deep down—this is just a thought experiment.) Right, so, the moral of the story is that soul-crushing ennui is lame, and is maybe due to inherent contradictions between the various parts of our lives and the fact that this is a quite odd and probably not totally healthy circumstance in the broader context of our evolutionary histories, and...yeah.

This somehow became very personal, which was not quite where I intended it to go.

I think it's time for me to re-enact that ban...

—

Endnotes:
1. Rahnema, Majid. "Development and the People's Immune System: the Story of Another Variety of AIDS." In The Post-Development Reader. Ed. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree. Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1997. 111-131.
2. Ibid., p.113.