• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Charles Eisenstein

  • About
  • Essays
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
    • Charles Eisenstein Random
    • New and Ancient Story Podcast
  • Courses
    • Climate — Inside and Out
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course One
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Two
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Three
    • Dietary Transformation from the Inside Out
    • Living in the Gift
    • Masculinity: A New Story
    • Metaphysics & Mystery
    • Space Between Stories
    • Unlearning: For Change Agents
  • Books
    • The Coronation
    • Climate — A New Story
    • The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
    • The Ascent of Humanity
    • Sacred Economics
    • The Yoga of Eating
  • Events
  • Donate

Humanity Grows Up

May 10, 2005 by Charles Eisenstein Leave a Comment

May 2005


“We have taken a monstrously wrong turn with symbolic culture and division of labor, from a place of enchantment, understanding and wholeness to the absence we find at the heart of the doctrine of progress. Empty and emptying, the logic of domestication with its demand to control everything now shows us the ruin of the civilization that ruins the rest. Assuming the inferiority of nature enables the domination of cultural systems that soon will make the very earth uninhabitable.”

– John Zerzan

I have drawn great inspiration from writers like Marshal Sahlins, Derrick Jensen, and John Zerzan, but their work is just a starting point. They offer a salutary antidote to conventional assumptions of progress that I ironically term “the ascent of humanity”, but let’s be clear: a return to a hunter-gatherer way of life is tantamount to a death sentence for 99.9% of the human race, given the low carrying capacity of the planet for foraging. I accept their main point at face value, that Stone Age life was immeasurably richer than modern life in all the ways that really count. That is my starting point for thinking about technology. Fundamentally, technology is an attempt to control and thus improve on nature. In parallel, social technologies are an attempt to improve on human nature – for example to take the raw material of the undomesticated child and fashion it into something that the culture considers better.

If Sahlins, Zerzan, and the primitivist movement is right, if technology has wrought not an ascent but the opposite, then we must examine the very premise of technology—making the world better. It has not made the world better. But perhaps there is another purpose lurking beneath the ideology of progress, another purpose that will emerge when our basic conception of self and nature changes too. Can we reconceive technology other than as a program of domination and control?

Obviously, the program of control is nearing an end, foundering on a convergence of crises that themselves are the consequence of control. Control breeds the necessity for even more control, until the system collapses under its own weight. In no realm is this more evident than education. An “incident” occurs, and the automatic response of the school authorities is to clamp down tighter, until today we have schools with razor wire, video surveillance, random locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, undercover police, and so on. Academically the exact same mentality has led to increasing reliance on standardization of curriculum, “standards”, testing, and so on. This is the mentality of the technological fix, attempting to repair the consequences of previous technology with yet more technology. In so doing we have indeed created a monster, a Hydra, in which problems proliferate to an intensity that eventually consumes every resource. The parallel with the “fix” of an addict is no accident.

On a deep level, the program of control makes sense if nature (including human nature) is seen as fundamentally bad—dangerous, harsh, brutal, etc. The ramifications of this view are deep. It echoes in religion, for example, in John Calvin’s doctrine of the “innate depravity of man.” Even more deeply, it echoes in the age-old division of the universe into matter and spirit, which leaves the former profane and the latter unworldly, setting up a war within ourselves to “be good” in parallel with the technological war of conquest against nature. Life becomes a struggle. We can see, therefore, that the “struggle for survival” we impute to the hunter-gatherer is actually a projection of our own anxiety.

This division between matter and spirit is actually quite new. Hunter-gatherers believed in a wholly enspirited world. It was really with agriculture that the concepts of good and evil emerged, along with the idea that some things are holier than others. Various religious reformers have noticed the error and tried to heal the division, only to have their teachings coopted and reversed. I could go on and on… and I have, for something like 600 pages, so I’ll spare you now.

Back to my starting point: I agree with Zerzan about one thing: Stone Age life was characterized by a wholeness, harmony, enchantment, and authenticity that is rare today. Recognizing this doesn’t mean we should dismantle the entire edifice of civilization though, just as recognizing the creativity, flexibility, and authenticity of a baby doesn’t mean we should imitate the physical condition of a baby. On the species level as well as the individual, we can integrate the virtues of our original state into adulthood.

As a species we are now in adolescence. The pre-adolescent has already reached the perfection of logical, rational thought (which can be quite aggravating sometimes! 🙂 ) The ego is fully developed by age 12 or 13. A discrete and separate self. However, contrary to the cultural assumption that this represents the highest degree of cognitive development, there is actually another stage (at least one) beyond this. Joseph Chilton Pearce describes it in terms of a development of the mysterious prefrontal cortex of the brain. In this stage, ego boundaries don’t dissolve, but are seen to be only provisionally real. Artificial. The self is experienced as something greater. Earlier cultures would quicken this transcendence through coming-of-age ceremonies that involved temporarily dismantling the ego through sensory deprivation, drumming, masks, psychotropic plants, pain, fasting, solitude, and so on.

Our species reached a state analogous to the pre-teen with the ascendency of the Newtonian-Cartesian world view and the apotheosis of reason. Over the past century, however, the scientific and cultural basis for the discrete and separate self has been crumbling. The present convergence of crises is humanity’s coming-of-age ceremony, our right of passage, into a new age of wholeness and connectedness. This is not a return to infancy, which is a state of wholeness yes, of non-individuation, but which has not yet integrated the experience of separation. For humanity to return to the hunter-gatherer womb would be a stillbirth. I am much more excited about the prospects for reaching adulthood. The powers of reason, science, technology will still be with us, just as a fully mature adult still has access to rational cognition, but it will be within a greater context. A cocreative partnership with the universe instead of domination and control. A cocreative partnership with the Wild. In education, a cocreative partnership with the child.

I’m not advocating a return to the Stone Age. More of a return to Stone Age values, thinking, and spirituality in a technological context. However, the technology that will emerge with such a return may be virtually unrecognizable.

I envision the induction of ecological principles into technological society. This would incorporate Hawken’s zero-waste “industrial ecology”, Silvio Gesell’s negative-interest “free-money”, a cultural belief in the innate divinity of all life and indeed all matter, an economics of The Gift (as per Lewis Hyde) in which people build careers based not on “how can I take enough?” but rather on “what can I best give?” And much more besides, including democratic and radical Montessori schooling, technologies of earth, light, and water, and eventually the full discovery of our role and function in the cosmos.

On a cosmic level, the purpose of our descent into Separation is to integrate that experience and return to Union at a higher level of consciousness. Our alienated adolescence is nearly at an end. From a certain perspective, yes, we have taken a monstrously wrong turn, as monstrous as the collective suffering of the last hundred generations. But just as with our personal suffering, sometimes we look back and understanding it all as part of our path to healing, to wholeness. Perhaps it is the same way with our species.

 

Charles Eisenstein, 2005

 


Previous: Don’t Should on US
Next: The Great Robbery

Filed Under: Political & Social Tagged With: adulthood, ascent, cultural narrative, Essay, primitivism, transition

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

All Essays

Peace-building

Time to Push

The Rehearsal is Over

Some Stuff I’m Reading

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

Words to a Young Man

How It Is Going to Be

What I’m doing here

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

World on Fire

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

Transcription: Fertile Ground of Bewilderment Podcast

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

Privacy Policy | Contact

Charles Eisenstein

All content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to copy and share.

Celo: 0x755582C923dB215d9eF7C4Ad3E03D29B2569ABb6

Litecoin: ltc1qqtvtkl3h7mchy7m5jwpvqvt5uzka0yj3nffavu

Bitcoin: bc1q2a2czwhf4sgyx9f9ttf3c4ndt03eyh3uymjgzl

Dogecoin: DT9ECVrg9mPFADhN375WL9ULzcUZo8YEpN

Polkadot: 15s6NSM75Kw6eMLoxm2u8qqbgQFYMnoYhvV1w1SaF9hwVpM4

Polygon: 0xEBF0120A88Ec0058578e2D37C9fFdDc28f3673A6

Zcash: t1PUmhaoYTHJAk1yxmgpfEp27Uk4GHKqRig

Donate & Support

As much as possible I offer my work as a gift. I put it online without a pay wall of any kind. Online course contributions are self-determined at the time you register for each. I also keep the site clean of advertising.

This means I rely on voluntary financial support for my livelihood. You may make a recurring gift or one-time donation using the form below, in whatever amount feels good to you. If your finances are tight at all, please do not give money. Visit our contact page instead for other ways to support this work.

Recurring Donations

Note from the team: Your recurring donation is a resource that allows us to keep Charles doing the work we all want him doing: thinking, speaking, writing, rather than worrying about the business details. Charles and all of us greatly appreciate them!

One-Time Donation

Your gift helps us maintain the site, offer tech support, and run programs and events by donation, with no ads, sales pitches, or pay walls. Just as important, it communicates to us that this work is gratefully received. Thank you!

Cryptocurrency Donation

Hi, here we are in the alternate universe of cryptocurrency. Click the link below for a list of public keys. If your preferred coin isn't listed, write to us through the contact form.

View Keys



What kind of donation are you making?(Required)


Recurring Donation

We are currently accepting monthly recurring donations through PayPal; we use PayPal because it allows you to cancel or modify your recurring donation at any time without needing to contact us.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.

One-Time Donation

We are currently accepting one-time donations with any major credit card or through PayPal.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.
Donation Method(Required)

Name(Required)
Email(Required)