Rejection of the idea of progress and economic growth, belonging to the paradigm of Modernity, is one of our fundamental positions. The ideology of degrowth (or anti-growth by Alain de Benoist) a priori implies a revision of the status of the so-called “industrial” and “post-industrial” society, which both are based on industrial or high-tech digital and closely related economic growth.
There is a generalized field of so-called “primitivist” socio-political theories or theories of “simple living” (plain people), which in the word and spirit of criticism of the technogenic civilization are very close to some intentions of the Pagan Traditionalism.
The primary consideration of these theories in the light of traditionalism we made in the second book “Polemos. Pagan traditionalism” (2016). Within the framework of this report, we want to briefly review the original ideas of the American anthropologist John Zerzan and their criticism.
Sociologist and anthropologist John Zerzan (b. 1943) is a contemporary icon of the left anarcho-primitivism ideology, author of numerous books and articles. In the late 1990s and early 2000s he actively defended and supported the arrested Theodor Kaczynski, but later refused to solidarity with him because of the Theodor’s apology of violence and the divergence of their ideas in general.
Methodologically Zerzan is an atheist and appeals to the socio-evolutionary and materialistic paradigms and arguments. For Zerzan the ideal is small egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies that live in harmony with nature. He negatively assesses the event of the Neolithic revolution, the domestication of livestock and the development of agriculture, considering this the beginning of the process of alienation. The modern highly developed civilization should be decisively rejected in favor of returning to this natural state of harmony.
The word “culture” comes from the Latin cultura, meaning “cultivation” — the application of human creativity to nature, the creation of tools and practices of labor and survival, as well as culture as a broad concept includes the spiritual realm and tradition. Zerzan in his theory stands on a fundamental and rigid opposition to any form of culture as interference with nature and the natural course of events. As soon as a person begins to intervene and change the closest space around him and change his practices — his alienation begins. Thus the tribe of gatherers in his picture of the world acts as an object completely entrusted to the faceless material forces of nature. Comparing the concepts of Zerzan and Spengler, one can see that they coincide in a negative assessment of the stage of civilization, but unlike Spengler, who saw a living principle in culture associated with myth and religion, Zerzan turns his gaze even further, into pre-cultural or out-of-cultural area of pre-history. Zerzan also proposes to completely abandon any human messianism in culture, including the teleology of being and existence.
Fundamental and innovative idea from John Zerzan is a radical criticism of symbolic culture, writing and language, which he sees as interconnected and sometimes synonymous. Being a supporter of pure experience, feeling and non-mediated by a high culture perception of reality, he accuses the division of labor and the development of writing in alienation and introducing hierarchical imbalances of power. In this it is not difficult to find traces of a specifically understood Marxist theory of culture and progress, the provisions of which were also shared by Levi-Strauss. But the fault lies not only on writing, but also on the symbolic nature of language and its abstractions in general. In the book “Twilight of the machines” he voiced his formula of criticism: “the infinitely diverse of reality is captured by a limited language”.
The problem raised and articulated by Zerzan is deep and meaningful indeed. Its consideration should be directed in three bounded ways.
The first aspect concerns the general theme of linguistic specificity of thinking and, as a consequence, the cultures of human societies. In the classical formulation of Sapir and Whorf, linguistic specificity was designated not as a theory, but as an empirically observable law in languages. Nevertheless, linguistic specificity or linguo-relativity does not mean a rigid determinism of all thinking and perception of reality through the prism of language. Consciousness is more complex and within the framework of the generalized Sapir-Whorf system an important role is played by the pre-linguistic experience of impressions, feelings and assimilation of external reality. Language penetrates and partially structures and accentuates the thinking of the native people, but nevertheless thinking itself is broader than language. Therefore, Zerzan’s assertion that reality is “captured” and “limited” by language is speculation. What a person sees — “the infinitely diverse of reality” — pushes him to give what he saw a name-word, or one way or another to place the assimilated thing into the mental domain of greater or lesser scope.
Within the framework of the traditionalism an understanding of the problem it is possible to designate a different perspective for considering the problem of linguistic relativity and expressiveness of language. Classical relativism exists in the horizontal plane of the plurality of natural languages and as a result, it recognizes the presence of specific mental accents or categories associated with the vocabulary and grammar of languages in various peoples. Whether is it more homogeneous large families of the European languages or special cases of individual archaic tribes. The traditionalistic view proposes to add to this plane a chronological vertical axis flowing from top to bottom. According to this approach, human languages with the course of historical time also follow the involution, which is expressed in the loss of poetic flexibility, existential richness of the symbol and wide semantic fields for leading word categories (for example, the Greek word “logos” has over a hundred meanings). Languages gradually “cool down” and stiffen, lose flexibility, acquire fixed lexical and grammatical constructions and more modern semantics[1], which is a merit of the language reforms of the Enlightenment or the consequences of revolutions, for example, the Great French or October Revolution in Russia. A definite ending of the anti-symbolism and anti-poetry of the language is L. Wittgenstein’s logical&analytical methodology and the doctrine of atomic facts.
Therefore, for example, the comparison of the American dialect of English or leading European languages with the languages of the American Indians or the language of the Piraha tribe occurred not only in the horizontal plane of differences in cultures and lifestyles, but it was a comparison of the modern European language with an archaic tribal language, which is closer to the structures of myth and tradition. Of course, neither Sapir and Whorf, nor Zerzan considered the issue in this perspective, so this approach is only awaiting its precise formulation, testing and argumentation. And, returning to Zerzan’s formula, it should be clarified that in the course of metaphysical involution, “the infinitely diverse of reality”, just like language, has suffered significant losses, simplifications and has become simply a poor “reality” of positivism and materialism.
The second aspect is related to the problem of reflecting reality in language and the role of the name and symbol in relation to a thing. For Zerzan “peaches are more important than their name”. In this he is consciously or not echoes Juliet’s words from the tragedy of W. Shakespeare, for which the name of the rose does not matter. This approach tends to consider the assignment of a name to a thing as an act of its alienation, the transformation of a thing into a concept isolated in thought and culture. People operate and appeal not to the peaches themselves, but to their name and mental and sociocultural reflection and associations. Since symbolic culture is generally unacceptable for John Zerzan, it should be abandoned. It can be assumed that the ideal world of Zerzan is a world of nameless unknown things and phenomena, in which groups of half-mute hunter-gatherers each time experience collisions with things as a first-time experience, which, moreover, is not preserved or transmitted in the language by the any form of symbols and abstractions.
Returning to the scene from Shakespeare, we see that Juliet recognizes the lover’s bodily (material) plan as primary thing. Montagues are not Romeo’s arms, legs or shoulders, so he can and should have rejected his name and accept any other, because his face and body will not change from this. But, contrary to the naivety of the young girl, it is the names of the two lovers (the names of things) that create all the tragic tension and attraction of their relationship and the tragedy by Shakespeare as a whole.
For traditionalism, the situation is fundamentally different. For Tradition the names and symbols of things play a huge role in expressing their essence. The distribution of things and phenomena of the world over the mental and linguistic domains in one way or another affects or completely reflects the essence of things in thinking and, as a result, in language. Therefore, both “rose” and “peach” are not just random names of things (according to Ferdinand de Saussure), but their important parts and, in a sense, addressing to the language and expression the face of things. A name or symbol either directly expresses the essence of a thing, or reflects one of its facets, etymologically, homonymously and associatively connecting with others, forming semantic fields. Thus, in “traditionalist linguistics” the symbol and the name are existentially richer and saturated than the strict sign.
The third aspect concerns the relationship of language, or rather writing, to power and hierarchy. Even Claude Levi-Strauss, follow the Marxist ideology, pointed out the class-power properties that may be originated and reinforced by the skill of writing and its demonstration to “illiterate” fellow tribesmen. Following Michel Foucault’s ideas about power and language, John Zerzan also argues that language, it`s grammar and writing are the structure and ideology of diversified hierarchical power, anchored in the thinking of people.
Anthropologist James Scott in his work on Zomia, points out that local groups of fugitives from the rule of the state often deliberately abandon writing as such and change their language practices in order to avoid enslavement by the state or to avoid grounds for the emergence of state-like hierarchies and relations within their own group[2]. The practices described by Scott are an intermediate option: this is not a rejection of language and symbols, but a rejection of writing as a way of accounting (population census, registration of subjects by name), subordination (knowledge of the sovereign’s writing or the state language with its semantics, oblivion of the native language) and exploitation (illiteracy as a lower social level). Within Zerzan’s primitive theory, an egalitarian “culture” of communication and interaction, free from the alienating influence of the division of labor and writing, is of particular importance. Zerzan calls it face-to-face[3] interaction, without socio-cultural-political masks and statuses. But in archaic and even recent history, such societies are not found. Even in the most socially simple communities of Zomia’s fugitives, clan-family hierarchies exist, and modern democratic societies of individuals also know civil ranks and statuses. Even among animals there are hierarchies. The Nepalese greeting “namaste” which literally means “The Divinity in me welcomes the Divinity in you”. Namaste tells us that different people in any case are masks of the same Divinity, therefore Zerzan’s maxim face-to-face de facto turns into the monistic formula of face-of-god-to-face-of-god. The Divine is also the source of language, symbol, religion, culture and power hierarchies.
Of course the issues of the development/degeneration of language and its relationship to thinking and power are relevant in the light of traditionalism, plurality of peoples and traditions, and primitivism too. But the solution proposed by John Zerzan — to completely exclude language and symbolic culture (art and religion), to return to the non-mediated experience of nameless things and being a herd, egalitarian half-animal dominated by the absolute power of elements of the nature — is an impossible and irrelevant scenario.
The abandonment of civilization according to Zerzan is revealed as another strategy for the unauthentic existence of das Man. Zerzan calls for abandoning “human messianism”, but this means a direct rejection of man as such, because man in himself is a symbol of the Divine and a reflection of the macrocosm. The desire for egalitarianism and the rejection of the rich diversity of traditional cultures reveals Zerzan as a follower of purely modern and progressive attitudes in the spirit of left liberalism. The main line of development of Western-centric humanity is to follows the path of transhumanism and Gestell, but das Man also works on the periphery, substantiating the rejection of Dasein by inscribing a man into a purely animal world and a mode of meager-being[4].
A more detailed examination of the ideas of John Zerzan and other representatives of the theories and practices of so-called “primitivism” in the broad context of traditionalism and the existential situation of Kali-Yuga will be presented in the book “Tradition and Future Shock”. It is currently in the writing process.
Evgeny Nechkasov
Philosopher, writer
Russia, Novosibirsk
[1] This is reflected in the shift of all traditional terminology and vocabulary into a large semantic domain of “primitive” and “archaic”, which is opposed by the progressive vocabulary of the Modern era.
[2] See: Scott James C. “The Art of Not Being Governed”.
[3] See: Zerzan J. “Running on Emptiness”.
[4] See: Heidegger Martin “Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit”.
