Interview with John Zerzan

This interview highlights some of John Zerzan's views and is worth reading. I'd like to draw attenion to a couple of issues he comments on.

One of the obvious problems with his rejection of symbolic thought, technology, language, art, religion, in short several essential ingredients of civilisation as we know it is its regression to a pre-historic paradise that looks more like a myth than anything else. It hasn't been proved, and if civilisation has all these problems it is not clear that we are any better off without them - nor does he generally offer much by way of alternatives (other than the pre-historic footnote). Admitting to this shortcoming he says:

I think you are right to suggest that we should avoid idealizing pre-history, refrain from positing it as a state of perfection.

He goes on to place his view of pre-history in the correct perspective, calling it "instructive and inspiring":

On the other hand, hunter-gatherer life seems to have been marked, in general, by the longest and most successful adaptation to nature ever achieved by humans, a high degree of gender equality, an absence of organized violence, significant leisure time, an egalitarian ethos of sharing, and a disease-free robusticity. Thus it seems to me instructive and inspiring, even if imperfect and and perhaps never fully known to us.

So basically there are these values we might strive towards: equality, absence of violence, abundant leisure time, egalitarian ethos, lack of disease. I would add to them his usual emphasis on sensual experience in the present. And the hunter-gatherer's lack of reliance on civilisation as we know it is the model to strive for then. Or that is the implication - Zerzan doesn't exactly offer it.

With regards to technology, the obvious question - and my own contention - is whether technology is reversible. In his view technology is never neutral - an eye-opener for sure - and therefore should be questioned:

Technology has never been neutral, like some discreet tool detachable from its context. It always partakes of and expresses the basic values of the social system in which it is embedded.

Ultimately his viewpoint on technology is worthwhile because of the moral dimension he introduces:

It is quite possible that it is irreversible, but the only way to know is to challenge it. If one concludes that the course of techno-progress is proving
disastrous then one is obliged to stop it, to reverse it. This is a matter of basic morality, it seems to me.

My own position must be clarified, but that is a task for another time. I am not quite ready to do so yet.

In the meantime I am reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, about which I will have something to say soon.