American't

Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (Expanded Edition)

Edited by John Zerzan

Feral House, 275 pages, $14

For all the kids who want to get in on the ground floor of the latest thing in white middle-class guilt, über-anarchist John Zerzan, beloved of the Black Bloc folks who brought you smashing Starbucks windows as political protest, presents this revised collection of essays by such varied folks as Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, about the virtues of simple living and the villainies of corporations, mass media, and agriculture.

That's right: Zerzan thinks we went wrong with the Neolithic revolution, nascent feudalism, out of which came the division of labor, the stratification of power, and, eventually, having to wait in line at the DMV. The only possible cure: The end of civilization itself.

Yes, this all sounds a bit crackpot, but the sad fact is that anarchism is rather high-profile these days-which only speaks to the dearth of real ideas about what to do about that schmuck in the White House and his Bible-humping friends. Like all impractical solutions, anarchism isn't as much a movement of the oppressed as it is of kids from the suburbs for whom dropping out of NYU, changing their names to "WolfWomyn" and never showering again is one more way to simultaneously say "fuck you, Dad!" and put off having to deal with adult reality for a few more years. (As Zerzan states in the introduction to the new edition, 15 new essays have been added to the anthology to compensate for the lack of female and "indigenous" contributors.)

From whence does the urge to grow dreadlocks and play the drums for pocket change in Union Square Park originate? The myths of the goodness of the primitive state and of the noble savage living in harmony with nature is a persistent one, going back, literally, to Eden-or at least the Biblical idea of pre-lapsarian perfection-and brought into the modern age by romantic writers who imagined Native Americans living virtuously in an unspoiled land. Yet, these fairy tales have always been about the well-off telling the less-well-off that they're better off poor. Doing away with civilization is a romantic luxury only the rich can afford; the people who are actually oppressed are too busy earning a living to want to tear down the system. (When I was growing up in the proletarian paradise of Canarsie, for instance, the worst insult you could call someone was "Communist.")

As anyone who has ever seen a documentary on Jane Goodall's chimps or taught in the New York City public school system knows, mammals in their natural state are more Hobbes-ian than any of us would like to admit. Mass extinctions followed the first Native Americans into North America, and "primitive" peoples the world over don't subsist on tofu from the local food co-op: They hunt and kill, Ted Nugent-style. Leave a group of human animals to their own devices, and the result is more Lord of the Flies than Gilligan's Island. The bigger, stronger, and more aggressive will hog the resources and women, while the sensitive philosophers like the self-styled "anarchists" will be confined to the nerd table of the cafeteria of life.

In the end, denouncing microwave ovens, contact lenses, and the division of labor as the root of all evil is naive on the level of a 16-year-old kid getting into Ayn Rand and embracing social Darwinism. The irony is that anarchist ideas about humanity sharing its cookies on a global scale are ultimately the result of over-socialization in our ostensibly egalitarian society. Anarchist thought really hasn't progressed beyond kindergarten. What Zerzan and his buddies are really saying is everyone should play nice with others because it's the right thing to do.

Fat chance.