#particularly in the anti-civ sense

[mobilefruit-gundam]

“Animism (grand, capital A) began to die as the city was being born. This does not mean the urge does, but that urge primarily moves us against ourselves and towards camping trips, Eschatology, and faith-based approaches to the sickness of this world. Our question is whether mediated experiences are the only ones we are capable of. If that is the case (as is likely), then our capacity for revelatory joy is similarly curtailed, all arguments to the contrary. If we are indeed broken are we capable of NOT being broken? As anarchist who have an interest in how the world operates- -and perhaps how we could perform as wooden shoes to it- -we are naive about what it looks like today to grind gears. We have an urge but little wisdom about the unforeseen consequences of our little strategies. This existential gap, between our desires and our capacity, is also the reason why we are so hungry for the possibility of animism.

The reason we will not solve the problem like the little special snowflakes that we are is because of exactly that, little and weak. Just as monotheism has succeeded in the deception that it represents a personal relationship between you and the almighty, parsed and mediated by priests, ministers, and the dining room table, animism needs a social fabric outside of civilization to keep warm. This social fabric isn’t as simple as playing outdoors with other children, starving for life lessons from the kitchen table where the elders sit and talk, or rituals that help you understand you are a part of something larger- -but one can imagine such simple phenomenon as things that have passed by, that few people experience today in lieu of screens. While the cell phone may itself be sacred and alive the things we see on it are mundane and ordinary and make us also mundane and ordinary.

It is on this unfertile land that spiritual practitioners attempt to live. Generally they have hardscrabble lives devoid of community or anything but scraps of information on how others did what they are trying to do. In this context it makes perfect sense that racial, silly, or fantastic elements (often the same thing) often time(s) infiltrate. It’s not that we can’t ‘go back,’ it is that doing so is just as difficult as marching into the void somewhere new. It just seems easier.

What I would propose, what a nihilist animism would entail, is an acknowledgement that a spiritual endeavor comes from a social practice. It has to pass the test of I/we. If you can find a group of people who are willing to ride the tension of being individuated, having undergone the great pain of core alienation in the modern world- -while not privileging one’s own experiences in a group- -then you could begin. Beginning would look like a long waiting- -while the traffic passes overhead, while your devices beep, bop, beep in your car, while you could be doing other things- -for the world around you to expose its language to you. This will not happen quickly. It will probably take years. This language could then shape a set of principles, a path to walk, that would make sense to your set of people.”

Relations Without End: Nihilist Animism - Aragorn!

[spacedkitty]

the definitions amongst the disparate leftist groups seem intentionally setup to cause semantic debates masquerading as ideological debates

the issue is that anti-civ wants to talk about and critique very specific things and one of the main words used to talk about those things is a specific usage of the word civilization.

many leftists just want to prevent anyone from ever thinking about these things or taking anti-civ seriously in the first place which is why they'll often describe anti-civ as primitivist or eco-fash or use some other thought terminating accusation.

this is also why its very common for leftists who do end up talking about anti-civ use entirely different and often useless definitions of civilization. one of the common claims is that civilization means anything humans have ever done... but what exactly is the purpose of that definition? how does it help you talk about or communicate something? its not helpful with talking about anything because its only purpose is to make it harder for people to understand what an anti-civ critique is trying to say. its actually very similar to capitalists saying that capitalism is anytime humans exchange anything so capitalism has always and will always exist.

unfortunately semantic debates are more memeable on the internet so why bother with a difficult ideological debate that might require introspection, questioning of assumptions, and making difficult decisions about where your priorities are.

I worry that this is a sentiment I've seen expressed by almost every group of leftists I've encountered on the internet, each with their own set of terminology/definitions that they state the other groups dismiss out of hand as some form of conspiracy to suppress their particular brand of leftist views.

I don't think any of these groups are wrong exactly, I just worry that perhaps the problem becomes one of insularity. I see why the definition being used is used in this case, because it helps to conceptualize of civilization in this manner when dealing with the particular critiques specific to anti-civ. However, without that context, it's extremely hard to parse and looks far closer to "well, like, society is evil and we should live in mud-huts" than makes sense, and in a world full of fascists, well, I've encountered a few people that truly seem to think that's the right approach..

Without context it is easy to see idiocy in the arguments of others if you are primed to do so (which our present society does an excellent job of).

Often I see people get absorbed into a particular brand of leftism and begin denouncing the others after having furious debates using words that seem to mean different things to the different parties. Sometimes when they encounter something to change their perspective they will jump to another brand with a similar fervor and go on to denounce the former brand with the same fervor they defended it with, now using different definitions.

I still have a great deal to learn, but it always feels difficult to do so when often genuine questions are treated with hostility and a dogmatic approach to a group's views. Which I guess I understand, given the frequency of trolls (from all sides of the political spectrum, let's be honest) attempting to waste people's time with frivolous bullshit.

I find myself looking into anti-civ and finding it compatible in many ways with my understandings of socialism and anarchism, and wondering why it felt so hostile and absurd when first I encountered it. Similar to the feelings I had when first learning of communism, socialism and anarchism.

Many leftists just want to prevent anyone from ever thinking about these things or taking anti-civ seriously

I honestly don't agree with you here. I know there are some who do, but I think the vast majority have gotten into confusing debates that mimicked impassible ideological differences and wrote it off, particularly when discussing with others in their movement.

A common problem I've encountered (particularly in online leftist circles) is one of defending ivory tower knowledge over conversational understanding, which makes understanding other groups significantly harder. If your go-to response to criticism or misunderstanding of your movement is "go read this tome" you open no doors to communication, only offering a silo of separate knowledge and perspective.

In summary, I don't think most leftists are opposed to understanding anti-civ, I think we are just primed by society and other leftist movements to see anti-civ perspectives, without the proper context, as reactionary and regressive. A view I think most leftist groups see in one another.

I hope things could possibly be shifted with better grassroots communication and like, maybe something as silly seeming as leftist dictionaries, but that remains to be seen (by me at least).

[eclipsedefflorescence]

So, how would you go about researching and producing HIV meds without civilisation? I'm not suggesting that the current system works particularly well or is free from dehumanizing experiences, in fact I'd love to see it replaced by socialism, but like ... how can you have highly specialized labs and scientists without civilisation, or meds without labs and scientists?

1. First to define "Civilization" because that's where we usually lose most people, simply because we aren't working with the same definitions. In a very basic sense, civilization is the social order that produces economics, social and religious morality, the delineation between productive work (which is good) and "labor" (which is bad). It is what Fredy Perlman terms "The Leviathan" - it's the social order from which societal demands and precepts arise from. It's the fabric of hegemonic power discourse that overrides the individual.

Yes, we have fervent critiques of cities and technology but the these in itself is not civilization, but rather civilization is what demands cities to exist to be able to produce and manufacture this overarching "reproduction of daily life" (the name of a great essay by Perlman btw). So here I want to seperate this narrative that defines The Leviathan as most important and specific nuances such as critiques of cities, technology, etc.

2. So this being said, there is no reason why scientists, pharmacologists, neurologists, etc. wouldn't exist. But starting basic there is a cool project called "Four Thieves Vinegar Collective" that teaches people to be able to set up a very safe and precise home lab for synthesizing and producing epi-pens, and their site specifically talks about synthesizing HIV antiretrovirals too. I highly recommend you check out fourthievesvinegar.org, this is what I'm talking about and it's already in functional application. And if they are aiming for synthesizing HIV antiretrovirals, medications like antibiotics and HRT doesn't seem like a stretch. I realize this doesn't cover very advanced things like MRIs, and other Big Equipment, but again those dont have to exist within the Leviathanic social order we call "Civilization."

So yeah. Rethink the definition of "Civilization" to be an aggressive critique of social systems and the power discourse that produces it, and realize that the pursuit of medicine and scientific understanding can and SHOULD be separated from the Leviathan that limits access and available resource for study, education, and application.

This doesnt address ecological and anti-colonial concerns and benefits of anti-civ framework specifically related to scientific study and medicine but this is already a short novel. So there you go :)

[militant-holy-knight]

The murderous radicals who set off bombs and killed hundreds on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka chose their targets with ideological purpose. Three Catholic churches were bombed, and with them three hotels catering to Western tourists, because often in the jihadist imagination Western Christianity and Western liberal individualism are the conjoined enemies of their longed-for religious utopia, their religious-totalitarian version of Islam. Tourists and missionaries, Coca-Cola and the Catholic Church — it’s all the same invading Christian enemy, different brand names for the same old crusade.

Officially, the Western world’s political and cultural elite does its best to undercut and push back against this narrative. The liberal imagination reacts with discomfort to the Samuel Huntingtonian idea of a clash of civilizations, or anything that pits a unitary “West” against an Islamist or Islamic alternative. The idea of a “Christian West” is particularly forcefully rejected, but even more banal terms like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian,” once intended to offer a more ecumenical narrative of Euro-American history, are now seen as dangerous, exclusivist, chauvinist, alt-right.

And yet there is also a way in which liberal discourse in the West implicitly accepts part of the terrorists’ premise — by treating Christianity as a cultural possession of contemporary liberalism, a particularly Western religious inheritance that even those who no longer really believe have a special obligation to remake and reform. With one hand elite liberalism seeks to keep Christianity at arm’s length, to reject any specifically Christian identity for the society it aims to rule — but with the other it treats Christianity as something that really exists only in relationship to its own secularized humanitarianism, either as a tamed and therefore useful chaplaincy or as an embarrassing, in-need-of-correction uncle.

You could see both those impulses at work in the discussion following the great fire at Notre-Dame. On the one hand there was a strident liberal reaction against readings of the tragedy that seemed too friendly to either medieval Catholicism or some religiously infused conception of the West. A few tweets from the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which used phrases like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian” while lamenting the conflagration, prompted accusations that he was ignoring the awfulness of medieval-Catholic anti-Semitism, and also that his Western-civ language was just a dog-whistle for white nationalists.

But at the same time there was a palpable desire to claim the still-smoking Notre-Dame for some abstract idea of liberal modernity, a swift enlistment of various architects and chin-strokers to imagine how the cathedral (owned by the French government, thanks to an earlier liberal effort to claim authority over Christian faith) might be reconstructed to be somehow more secular and cosmopolitan, more of a cathedral for our multicultural times.

This seems strange, since as Ben Sixsmith noted for The Spectator, “it would never cross anyone’s mind to suggest that Mecca or the Golden Temple should lose their distinctively Islamic and Sikh characters to accommodate people of different faiths.” But an ancient, famous Catholic cathedral is instinctively understood as somehow the common property of an officially post-Catholic order, especially when the opportunity suddenly arises to renovate it.

As with monuments, so with beliefs. Consider the fascinating interview my colleague Nicholas Kristof conducted for Easter with Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, long the flagship institution for liberal Protestantism. In a relatively brief conversation, Jones declines to affirm the resurrection, calls the Virgin birth “bizarre,” shrugs at the afterlife and generally treats most of traditional Christian theology as an embarrassment.

But is Jones a Richard Dawkins-esque scoffer or a would-be founder of a Gnostic alternative to Christianity? Hardly: She’s a Protestant minister and a leader and teacher for would-be Protestant ministers, who regards her project as the further reformation of Christianity, to ensure the continued use of its origin story and imagery (and its institutions, and their brands, and their endowments) for modern liberal and left-wing purposes. It’s another distilled example of the combination of repudiation and co-optation, the desire to abandon and the desire to claim and tame and redefine, that so often defines the liberal relationship to Christian faith.

If you aren’t a liberal Christian in the mode of Serene Jones, if you believe in a literal resurrection and a fully-Catholic Notre-Dame de Paris, this combination of attitudes encourages a certain paranoia, a sense that the liberal overclass is constantly gaslighting your religion. That elite will never take your side in any controversy, it will efface your beliefs and traditions in many cases and be ostentatiously ignorant of them in others … but when challenged, its apostles still always claim to be Christians themselves or at least friends and heirs of Christianity, and what’s with your persecution complex, don’t you know that (white) American Christians are wildly privileged?

This last dig is true in certain ways and false in others. It’s true that conservative Christians in the United States can fall into a narrative of martyrdom that doesn’t fit their actual position, true that the presidency of Donald Trump attests to their continued power (and their vulnerability to its corruptions!). On the other hand the marginalization of traditional faith in much of Western Europe is obvious and palpable, and the trend in the United States is in a similar direction — and residual political influence is very different from the sort of enduring cultural-economic power that a term like “privilege” invokes.

But if the equation of traditional Christianity with privilege has some relevance to the actual Euro-American situation, when applied globally it’s a gross category error. And so the main victims of Western liberalism’s peculiar relationship to its Christian heritage aren’t put-upon traditionalists in the West; they’re Christians like the murdered first communicants in Sri Lanka, or the jailed pastors in China, or the Coptic martyrs of North Africa, or any of the millions of non-Western Christians who live under constant threat of persecution.

One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and United States-allied governments in the Muslim world, secular totalitarians in China and North Korea. Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. (“Islamophobia” looms large; talk of “Christophobia” is almost nonexistent.)

This absence reflects, once again, the complex combination of liberal impulses toward Christianity. There is a fear that any special focus on Christians will vindicate the jihadist narrative of a clash of civilizations. There is a certain ignorance of Christianity’s enduringly and increasingly global form, an inability to see Christianity as anything save a reactionary foe or a useful supplement to liberalism. There is a fear that narratives of global Christian persecution will somehow help the conservative side of Western culture wars. (“Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West” ran the headline of a worried Washington Post “analysis,” as though the most worrying consequence of dead Christians in South Asia were angry conservatives in America.) And there is a sense of Christianity as somehow still “our” religion, the dogmas discarded but the emphasis on self-abnegation retained — albeit in a strange fashion that ends, as John O’Sullivan put it recently, by taking “the good Samaritan to be a parable of why Christians should be the last people to be helped.”

Unfortunately the various conservative alternatives to this liberal muddle are not always more helpful to persecuted Christians. George W. Bush’s conservative-Christian naïveté helped doom Iraqi Christians. American-conservative support for Israel creates blind spots about the struggles of Arab Christians. The conservative nationalism that succeeded Bush’s idealism often treats Christianity instrumentally and forges its own alliances with persecutors.

At bottom all these failures illustrate the unusual and difficult position of traditional Christianity in Europe and the United States. The old faith of don’t-call-it-Western-civilization is at once too residually influential and politically threatening to escape the passive-aggressive frenmity of liberalism, and yet too weak and compromised and frankly self-sabotaging to fully shape a conservative alternative.

But those difficulties and dilemmas are also a luxury relative to what our fellow Christians face. I have no clear prescription for Western Christianity to offer in this column, but I do have an admonition: It is First Communion season in America as well as in South Asia, and when our children ascend in joy and safety to the altars of our churches, the photographs of Sri Lankan first communicants laid out as martyrs should be ever in our thoughts. 

[miniti8]

Day 4: Space Aliens Part 2: Pilgrims from Afar

In which I set up another dangling plot thread that’ll be fun if I want to get to the wider universe.  Let’s meet the centaurpedes!

I like this strong start I’ve been doing, but as I can’t sustainably spend my whole life writing about space aliens, I’m gonna slow it down and do one race today, no extra fancy drawings, and mb some more planet details tomorrow.  These aliens live on that ring of green planets just within the Ring, hereafter the Bead Ring.  Here’s what these fellas look like:

They have three pairs lower legs (maybe more?  They aren’t called hexadectaurpedes) and three pairs arms, each pair with a different function (fine manipulation, strong grip, half hand-half foot helpful balancey appendages?).  They have eyes all round their buggy little heads, and a couple sets of pedipalps that have lost some of the finer manipulative abilities over the years as hands possessing reach have been being used preferentially.  Despite their buggy appearance, they have an endoskeleton and probably a decently recognizable musculature in addition to their exoskeleton, which is more designed for protection than structure.  The whole body is covered in this thick and insulating integument, meaning the centaurpedes need somewhat less protections for the cold vacuum of space than their animalien friends from other moons.  It’s a subject of intense study by setting engineers in attempts to replicate the structure for effective space insulation.  Their back is covered by a thicker shell-like bit, and centaurpedes being pretty big (10 feet tall?), you could fit like twelve kobolds back there, 0 to a few dragons depending on size, and I dunno, a lot of equipment or something.

Centaurpedes have a wide range of vision, both fieldwise and spectrumwise, due to big and cool eyes all about their heads.  Their antennae provide them with solid hearing as well.  No other senses are particularly notable, other than smell being diminished relative to ancestors and fellows.  Various palp movements add clicks and chitters to a humanlike method of speech via air passing through lungs.  

The “secret” here is that these beings were descended from ancestral centaurpedes, and in fact are a genetically modified subspecies made to be better at small-moon life rather than the planet they were originally from!  Modifications included Improved and Scattered Eyes, the sick integument, specialized hands, and a smaller (!) size than their predecessors.  The civ that created them had oodles of excellent technology, genetic and otherwise, remnants of which litter the larger Bead Ring moons.  Ill-understood behemoths originating from these extraterrestrials pump oxygen into moons’ atmospheres, allowing for the maintenance of terraformed planetlets bursting full of oxygen-using life.  The breakdown of one of these on one planet is causing issues but leading to some belated discoveries on how the old hunks of junk work.  

Ancestral!centaurpede civilization peaked several millennia ago, shortly after the establishment of these colonies, one of several large-scale genemod populations established by a large empire, which may even have arrived from outside the solar system.  Initially starry relationships between the parental empire, providing well for its valuable and hard-to-replace constituents, and colonies which provided it with valuable resources and scientific data, quickly soured.  An out-of-the-way outpost was easy to ignore for politicians trying to curry favor with their closer constituents, and as the Support The Space Troops ethos waned in the homelands, the colonies found themselves short on interstellar resources and consequently on patience, leading to revolution.  The founders of the new state initially tried for economic relations with the estranged empires, but more radical, anti-original fragments of the population preached self-sufficiency, and that made more sense to the people so that won the day; the centaurpedes lost contact with their parent empire and, since nobody’s popped up to check on them, it’s presumable that it’s gone, much less powerful, or they forgot about them too.  Millenia is long.

The revolution came with a tide of anti-intellectualism, at least on the main moon; disdain for political dominants mixed with disdain for the at-home rich upper class in “isolated cities with air conditioned bubbles”, as well as those doing scientific work for an empire that didn’t care for them.  The mostly agrarian population led a second revolution after the first, and some technological and historical records were lost or, in some cases, burned.  The political waters of the Ring have not been still since, and at story present, there exists a very loose confederation of moons with divergent cultures but common technological interests, and a pan-centaurpede-nationalism movement has been emerging in response to discoveries concerning ancestral technology.

Over the years various technologies, often spaceflight related, that were once common became too taken-for-granted to be worth maintaining, then too in disrepair to figure out how to put back together again.  Laser-based mineral purification?  In this economy?  Life on each bead persists with a unique patchwork of old and new technology, and history has become a patchwork quilt, with reports of a properly spacefaring ancestor becoming apocryphal in most places.  Alien life is a pretty common sight in most major cities around the moons, though there are xenophobic backwaters.  

There is more to build here, about social structure, moon cultures, tech levels, etc, but it will have to wait for another day...  Probably gon be some space geology tomorrow.  Thanks for reading!