Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain
Manifesto
By Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine
Reviewed by
John Gray - 10 September 2009
We have, it seems, led the planet into the age of
ecocide. Can civilisation survive the unavoidable environmental
catastrophe? To stand a chance we will need cool heads, not fiery
dreams.
Walking on lava
During the past century empires crashed, new states foundered,
utopian projects failed and entire civilisations melted down.
Revolutionary change was the norm, as it has been throughout modern
times. Yet today many of us assume our present way of life will last for
ever, and any suggestion that it may be facing intractable difficulties
is dismissed as doom-mongering. The result is that the precariousness of
modern civilisation is underestimated and the impression that things can
go on indefinitely, much as they do now is touted as hard-headed
realism.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto begins with the observation that
this appearance of stability is delusive. "The pattern of ordinary life,
in which so much stays the same from one day to the next," the authors
write, "disguises the fragility of its fabric." Written by Paul
Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, this slim pamphlet aims to demolish
contemporary beliefs about progress, industrialism and the place of
human beings on the planet, and up to a point it succeeds. Much in
contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it
is refreshing to see these myths clearly identified as such. The authors
are right that none is more powerful than the idea that we are separate
from the natural world, and free to use it as we see fit.
But is it true that civilisation is also a myth, as Kingsnorth and Hine
claim? Would human beings - or the planet that they are ravaging - be
better off if civilisation collapsed? The authors tell us that our
present way of life "is built upon the stories we have constructed about
our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen
species".
These legends, they continue, have "led the planet into the age of
ecocide". The spread of civilisation and the destruction of the
biosphere have gone together. The human future, it seems to the authors,
must lie in "uncivilisation".
Kingsnorth and Hine seem to present uncivilisation as chiefly a project
for writers and artists. They do not appear to be fixed on tackling
environmental crisis with new policies or any kind of political action.
A change of sensibility is what they are after, and it is interesting to
note the writers they pick out as exemplars of this new view of things.
One is Robinson Jeffers, the once-celebrated and now much-underrated
Californian eco-poet from one of whose verses the Dark Mountain project
takes its name. Others include Wendell Berry, W S Merwin and Cormac
McCarthy. Joseph Conrad is mentioned more than once, and cited
approvingly for his view (summarised by his friend Bertrand Russell)
that civilised life is "a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely
cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into
fiery depths".
It is intriguing to see which writers do and do not make it on to the
authors' list. J G Ballard, whose entire work can be seen as an
exploration of the flimsiness of civilised existence, is left out, while
Conrad's inclusion shows only that the authors have seriously
misunderstood him. In a passage quoted in the pamphlet, Conrad writes:
"Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character,
their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their
belief in the safety of their surroundings."
For Conrad, the safety of civilised life was always partly illusory, if
only because "civilisation" itself is never more than partial; the heart
of darkness was as much in London as in the Congo. But even though
civilisation is indelibly flawed, that does not mean it deserves to be
destroyed; on the contrary, Conrad was convinced civilisation must be
defended with unyielding determination. In reality, the alternative - a
raw version of which he witnessed in King Leopold's private fiefdom in
the Belgian Congo - is madness and unrestrained violence, a state that
can reasonably be described as barbarism.
The authors' misreading of Conrad provides a clue to their reasons for
excluding Ballard from their list of kindred spirits. Ballard's early
life in a Shanghai internment camp taught him that the disintegration of
society does not produce any better version of the human animal. It may
lead to a kind of personal liberation - at least if you are an
adolescent boy, as Ballard was when he was interned - but overall the
result of social collapse is to give free rein to the most psychopathic
and predatory among us.
The notion that social breakdown could be the prelude to a better world
is a Romantic dream that history has proved wrong time and again. China
and Russia have suffered complete social breakdown on several occasions
during their history, as did much of Europe in the period between the
two world wars. The result has never been the stable anarchy that is
sometimes envisioned in the poetry of Jeffers. Instead, it is the thugs
and fanatics who promise to restore order that triumph, whether Lenin
and Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, or Hitler and assorted petty
dictators in Europe. It is the old Hobbesian doctrine - one that has
never been successfully superseded.
The authors do not tell us what they expect to happen after civilisation
has disappeared, but it may be something like the post-apocalyptic,
neo-medieval world imagined by the nature mystic Richard Jefferies in
his novel After London, or Wild England (1885). In it,
Britain is depopulated after ecological disaster and reverts to
barbarism; but it is not long before a new social order springs up,
simpler and happier than the one that has passed away. After London
is an Arcadian morality tale that even Jefferies probably did not
imagine could ever come to pass.
Over a century later, the belief that a global collapse could lead to a
better world is ever more far-fetched. Human numbers have multiplied,
industrialisation has spread worldwide and the technologies of war are
far more highly developed. In these circumstances, ecological
catastrophe will not trigger a return to a more sustainable way of
life, but will intensify the existing competition among nation states
for the planet's remaining reserves of oil, gas, fresh water and arable
land. Waged with hi-tech weapons, the resulting war could destroy not
only large numbers of human beings but also much of what is left of the
biosphere.
A scenario of this kind is not remotely apocalyptic. It is no more than
history as usual, together with new technologies and ongoing climate
change. The notion that the conflicts of history have been left behind
is truly apocalyptic, and Kingsnorth and Hine are right to target
business-as-usual philosophies of progress. When they posit a cleansing
catastrophe, however, they, too, succumb to apocalyptic thinking. How
can anyone imagine that the dream-driven human animal will suddenly
become sane when its environment starts disintegrating? In their own
catastrophist fashion, the authors have swallowed the progressive fairy
tale that animates the civilisation they reject.
A change of sensibility in the arts would be highly desirable. The new
perspective that is needed, however, is the opposite of apocalyptic.
Neither Conrad nor Ballard believed that catastrophe could alter the
terms on which human beings live in the world. Both writers were
unsparing critics of civilisation, but they never imagined there was a
superior alternative. Each had witnessed for himself what the
alternative means in practice.
Rightly, Kingsnorth and Hine insist that our present environmental
difficulties are not solvable problems, but are inseparable from our
current way of living. When confronted with problems that are insoluble,
however, the most useful response is not to await disaster in the hope
that the difficulties will magically disappear. It is to do whatever can
be done, knowing that it will not amount to much. Stoical acceptance of
this kind is practically unthinkable at present - an age when emotional
self-expression is valued more than anything else. Still, stoicism will
be needed if civilised life is to survive an environmental crisis that
cannot now be avoided. Walking on lava requires a cool head, not one
filled with fiery dreams.
John Gray is chief book reviewer of the New Statesman. His most
recent book is "Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings" (Allen Lane, £20)
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