Rogue Primate
This is a review of a book review of John Livingston’s book Rogue Primate 1994. Any attention that can be directed to this book is better than none. I haven’t actually finished reading the book, but in the late 1980s Livingston presented his ideas in two episodes of David Suzuki’s A Planet for the Taking 1988 that he wrote, which I saw and was thus exposed to our apparent condition of being domesticates.
The book review was 1996, time enough for this ideas to spread, be considered, and rejected by all modern humans who must reject in order to remain part of the modern zero-order humanism of the monetary culture we all swim in. Livingston was a naturalist, i.e. a human who endeavored to listen to nature who has all the answers (instead of prattling primates who have all the answers). Livingston was a modern human mutant.
While modern humans do resemble zoo animals in their denormalization, we are actually far further from being normal animals than those zoo animals whose parents may have been normal evolvable animals (apart from those who have been captive bred for several generations). What we moderns resemble far more are those animals who have become domesticated to depend on us for their persistence, e.g. dogs (7k generations from wild), cows (1.5k generations), lab rats (1k generations from wild Norway rats), and modern humans (3k generations of unintended auto-domestication to serve technology and ideology).
Dogs descended (became domesticated) from a now extinct species of wolf, some of whom became human hunter mutualists dependent on getting parts of a kill the humans wouldn’t (or couldn’t as only so much could be eaten by nomads before spoilage set in) be able to consume.
The condition of dependance is the basis for becoming a domesticant. Wolves that came to associate with humans who failed to interact with humans as dogs do were more likely to be killed or their offspring more likely to be devalued. The story of human agency and intent being the cause of animal domestication is overstated by modern humans.
Some wolves who became dependent on humans would soon be favored and not others (e.g. those aggressive/threating towards humans would soon be made to go away (e.g. killed) and in a hundred generations would be vastly altered from normal wolves (i.e. unable to rejoin them). Figure 4.5 years per wolf generation. The passing of 500 years of dependence on humans 30 thousand years ago would have been enough to denormalize wolves, to make them obligate codependents.
The first wolves who began to follow humans to scavenge kill sites did not foresee the outcome, nor did the first humans who tended fire do so with the intent of becoming modern humans dependent on technology. It would be as incorrect to say that wolves domesticated themselves to prosper greatly (900 million today and counting) as it would be to say that humanity domesticated itself to serve technology (and ideology) to prosper greatly (8.1 billion and counting).
In the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone there are now about 120 wolves living in the largely depopulated area, but still 1000 dogs (humans still work in the area and feed them) clustered around the nuclear power site ruins. If all humans had left and never ever returned to the Exclusion Zone, would any feral dogs remain? And when modern fossil-fueled technology ends (whether in 50 or 500 years), will billions of modern human domesticants persist?
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The original book review contains the references, and the below has been shortened [with notes in brackets] to focus on Livingston’s ideas.
Livingston’s central thesis is that just as it has bred a number of animals (cattle, goats, pigs, etc.) to de-emphasize certain wild traits [an outcome, no agency, intelligence or intent needed], the human species has domesticated itself to the point where it too has forgotten its place in the natural world [likely an unintended outcome]. Because domesticates are selected for passivity, reduced sensory acuity, tolerance of crowding, and homogeneity, they lose their natural penchant to organize themselves into stable social structures and so to respond properly to eco-social constraints [e.g. carrying capacity which feral dogs and lab rats ignore]. Cattle are a good example: “Glazed, dulled blurred travesties of their once-wild ancestors, they give the impression not only of failure to recognize one another, but a failure to recognize even their own species… A domesticated hoofed grazer or browser no longer has relevance in the broader natural community. It is in every respect a ‘loose cannon’, contributing nothing to the functioning of the greater living surround, and potentially devastating to it” (p. 24–25). Anyone who has spent much time on a dairy farm or ranch will recognize this portrayal as essentially correct. But Livingston’s real point is that humans have [in effect] simply made cattle over in their own image. As with cattle, “Our sensory inadequacies, ironically enough, probably assist us in enduring the terrible dreary sameness and homogeneity of the human physical environment, and our crowded confinement in it. Our tolerance of sensory undernutrition and our placid, docile acceptance of it is worthy of that paragon of passivity, the Holstein cow” (p. 33).
Livingstone suggests that the human evolutionary specialty is “storable, retrievable, transmissible technique,” and that this “prosthetic” form of being has rendered us helpless without it. “We are bound to technique, indentured to technique, and we grew naturally into serfdom along our evolutionary way. The dependence into which we have grown has made us not merely the servants of how-to-do-it, but one of its very artifacts. The problem animal is its own creation, its own domesticate” (p. 12). The self-absorbed, hot house environment of domestication leads to an unhealthy “zero-order humanism,” which he defines as an “ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise” (p. 140), as well as a kind of ultimate “trump card” which “carries its own moral authority and, like any other absolute, requires no explication or justification” (p. 142). What humanists think of as unmitigated triumph, our expanding capability to manipulate nature instrumentally is what Livingstone (following Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, and a host of others) views as a double-edged sword, whose dangerous efficiency allows us to sever the ecological basis for existence even as we declare that we, as the central figures in time’s drama, are simply following through on our evolutionary predisposition to dominate nature.
Much of the rest of Livingston’s critique likewise covers already well-trodden ground. A chapter on exoticism explores the human-assisted dispersal of species and its negative effect on biotic diversity, a subject ably documented by Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism and Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World; the sections about the influence of classical economics on Darwin’s thinking add little to a theme that by now has entered even the popular imagination, through widely-read books like Jeremy Rifkin’s Algeny. Similarly, Livingston’s argument for an expanded notion of self follows a line of cybernetic thinking that passes through Gregory Bateson to Livingston’s fellow-York University faculty member Neil Everndon, whose The Natural Alien has so far set the bar for Canadian environmental philosophy. Ubiquitous as well is the echo of Thoreau, whose uncompromising commitment to place, “wildness,” and the value of unmediated experience informs Livingston’s writing throughout. In this passage, for example, Thoreau’s favorite bird makes an appearance:
“When I identify a bird song as that of the wood thrush, I am thereby not only demonstrating my skill and knowledge but also my ability to categorize the animal, thereby reducing it to an inanimate cipher within a greater abstract taxonomic classification. It is equally true, however, that when I learned the song of the wood thrush in my childhood, the bird became my familiar and my friend, who through my life reminds me of his presence with his voice. It pleases me to welcome the old friend returning after a long winter’s absence. If I did not know who was singing, there could no doubt be some aesthetic appreciation of the sound, which unlike many bird songs happens to be euphonious to the human ear, but there would be none of the intimate pleasure of personal re-cognition. My childhood experience of the bird, and its lifelong annual relationship is more satisfying than the last. What I celebrate is not merely the existence of the wood thrush, however; it is my connection to him. My bond to him. My self in him.” (p. 128–29)
Although most of his arguments aren’t new, Livingston’s strength is his ability to render in evocative language what are relatively complicated philosophic positions without surrendering rigor. That ability, along with his unquestioned “feeling for the organism” (to borrow Barbara McClintock’s phrase), leads to perhaps the most interesting chapter, a dissection and repudiation of the discourse of natural rights, particularly animal rights. Livingstone agrees with ecofeminists and some environmental ethicists that the extension of “rights” to animals is a highly anthropocentric move, one which only promulgates the chauvinism it hopes to target. Livingstone points out that “If we are so much as to use the language of ethics, then we are bound to contain our arguments within the domesticated metaphysical dome of zero-order humanism. Conventional arguments can take us no further than the power-based human political structures of interests and obligations, rights and duties, and the primacy of the individual” (p. 171). He claims that “This simply is not good enough for Nature,” which “does not appear to be organized along the sociopathological lines of hierarchical dominance, and thus requires no form of antidote, Nature is of other stuff. It is wild” (p. 171–72).
And there is that word again wild. “Wildness,” in fact, turns out to be Livingston’s own trump card, the “stuff” that grounds his critique and which he nominates as the vehicle to carry us all down the royal road of environmental sanity. Just as Thoreau cited the experience of wild nature as the cure for his own shallow, materialistic culture, Livingstone detects in “wildness” the potential energy required to scrape the anthropocentric scales from our eyes. If we can but release that energy (which remains our genetic birthright despite the predominance of zero-order humanism) we might be able to “remove the mythological ‘imaginative insulation’ that surrounds a human society, reveal the world outside the cultural stockade, and “presto“ good things can follow (p. 149).
Those “good things” include, for example, the recognition that “our treatment of the non-human [is] not merely “wrong“ in some contrived moral philosophic sense, but monstrous and unnatural” (p. 175). “Wildness” has that revelatory, healing power: when we give rein to the wild impulses straining within us we find ourselves once again in joyful harmony with the rest of creation, not because that harmony is “right” in a transcendent sense but simply because it feels good. “The dissolution of the ego-centered self, as when one was drawn close, ever closer and at last into the gold-flecked eye of a toad, or when melted into black earthy humus, laced with wintergreen, on a cool forest floor. When one sought, and found; when one relinquished, and was free…. That quality of wildness remains in us.” (p. 196–97). He concludes the book by imploring us to “Look at a child gently holding an unfledged young robin that has fallen from its nest. Look into that child’s eyes. The sweet bondage of wildness is recoverable” (p. 197).
The book reviewer is Andrew McMurry, English professor, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The rest is of interest as a study in obfuscation (“the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language”), of how and why one who is a zero-order humanistic domesticant who serves Modern Techno-Industrial society (whose bread he eats) cannot understand the implications of what his salary, and relationship with friends, family, coworkers, students… depends upon his not understanding.
I will include the rest as data of interest — no agreement or disagreement implied.
It may be stating the obvious to note that Livingston is deconstructing one metaphysic (“zero-order humanism”) only to erect another, albeit more appealing, one (“wildness” or what some detractors of deep ecology prefer to call “irrationalism” and worse). Perhaps more salient, however, is the observation that a goal like reversing the degradation of the earth, if achievable, must be pursued through social communication, not by a rejection of communication in favor of mute, personal contemplation. That is to say, while it may be desirable in general terms to have more people engaging in nature appreciation, our society at large has developed in such a way that those personal reflections do not necessarily translate into positive environmental gains. “Find the wild child in each of us,” Livingstone seems to say, “and the rest will take care of itself.” Unfortunately, society is far too complex and too differentially organized to expect that its processes and activities might align themselves in some coordinated pattern of sustainability arising out of Livingston’s grand green gestalt.
Instead, the social system deals with self-generated complexity by forming multiple subsystems responsible for different areas of communication and action. These “function systems” have taken on a kind of virtual life of their own, quite apart even from the people who supply their raw semiotic material. Such systems appear to pursue their own internal goals blindly, as if in ignorance of their environments, whether “environment” is considered as “nature,” persons, or other function systems. An environment becomes simply that which does not communicate with the system, and hence is the system’s “other.” The scientific function system, for example, is based on a distinction which seeks to divide communications about the world into either “true” or “false.” Science constitutes itself as a kind of organism that feeds itself on truth and casts off falseness into its environment. Its only rationale as a system is to maintain its organization by continuing to process communications according to this particular code; it sees the world according to that Manichean formula, and that is all it sees.
How a theory of social systems (such as the one adumbrated here, developed by the German social scientist Niklas Luhmann) can help us see the limitations of Livingston’s call for dramatic forms of consciousness-raising is by forcing us to consider the relationship of individual to social system. What Livingston despises as economic, legal, political, and scientific blindness to the health of the environment cannot be overcome simply by a renovation in conscious, individual systems. The various function systems of contemporary society will not respond in a uniform fashion to the “moral” communications which would presumably arise from the new consciousness Livingston imagines. It is painfully obvious of late, for example, that morality has no more influence on the economy than it does on the weather. Morality has its own sphere of operation (in conscious systems of individuals and in the programming of the religious function system) but the systems of society simply do not recognize morality as a functional consideration.
In this sense, we don’t have an environmental problem so much as a problem of environments, each of which is produced by the system which defines it. The first step toward a solution to the problem of “nature,” such as it can be imagined in toto, is to ensure that we understand what it is that various systems “think” about the world, that, for example, the world according to the economy is always and necessarily reducible to no more than a positive or negative exchange of money. Then we realize that the narrow perspective of the economic system can only be combated through the other systems, probably by making the environment of the economic system more “irritable,” thus forcing it to modify its structures if it wants to “survive.” Needless to say, then, the challenge at hand is even more complicated than Livingstone imagines, and certainly more complicated than can be discussed here. But it does seem likely that the deep ecological solution is by no means deep enough, avoiding, as it so often does, the social nature of the “nature problem” by searching for a new “zero-order” to replace the old one rather than seeking a “second-order” perspective that is partial, relative, and distributed among the various systems involved.
Still, it’s easy to see why Canadian environmental “communicators” might be bitter: despite the efforts of best-selling authors like Farley Mowat, David Suzuki, and now Livingston himself, not to mention the many highly-publicized protests of aboriginals and activists and even the work of a few progressive provincial governments, the Canadian populace remains relatively complacent when it comes to environmental issues. We hear that we have more wolves and bears, more freshwater and more trees than anywhere else in the world, but we forget that we also have the bloodiest hunts, the widest clear-cuts, and some of world’s largest river diversions and dams. Even the total collapse of the cod fishing industry seems to have happened in a remote province far out in the Atlantic, whose entire population could fit in a corner of Toronto.
Perhaps, like the earth itself, Canada is simply too big for most people to comprehend ongoing environmental degradation in a way that really resonates. A highly urbanized country where most people live within one hundred miles of the American border, Canada’s hinterland stretches away so far north that what happens much past the city limits is directly experienced by very few. Then, too, are the terms of our highly decentralized political federation, which permit provincial governments to reverse the policies of their predecessors and ignore the national will at a speed and to an extent that would astonish Americans, who by contrast possess remarkably stable and incrementalist legislative processes.
“Canada is a beautiful dream,” said our Prime Minister recently as part of an effort to keep that selfsame federation from expiring under regional and linguistic pressures. The dream of limitless evergreen forests, pristine lakes and rivers and mountain fastnesses, herds of caribou moving across vast arctic plains — that dream is also in danger of expiring, imperiled on every front by a social system that acknowledges few ecological limits and considers none sacrosanct. If Rogue Primate is at times too much a jeremiad against this seemingly implacable system and too little an analysis of why it might be that way, Livingstone has at least produced a very powerful jeremiad. And perhaps until such time as those ecological limits are themselves more powerfully felt and the system begins, perhaps belatedly, to respond, the jeremiad will remain the eco-radical’s genre of choice. This is because at bottom the jeremiad is a means of avoiding through passionate force the difficult question no eco-radical (ironically, always the ultimate optimist) really wants to face: how to get from this world to that one, the one in which we are restored to the garden, wild once again, when all signs say you can’t get there from here.
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[Modern humans will, in the form of being modern human expansionists, go extinct — or worse (become Borg-like expansionists in this our cosmos for the taking). Walk about a campus anywhere. Ask, ‘why are all these students and teachers here?’ Skip all the fine words. We are here to serve the monetary culture, to grow the economy in recognition of “the necessary primacy of the human enterprise.”]