Jason Godesky har skrivit en lång och briljant artikel om myten om den ädla vilden, och på vilka sätt den är sann respektive osann. Artikeln har vuxit till ett slags samlat manifest där han knyter ihop trådar från sina äldre artiklar om ursprungliga kulturer. Några smakprov följer:

Horticultural techniques used by Native groups (many of them are now employed by permaculturalists) encouraged higher levels of succession, with species that supported human prosperity while simultaneously encouraging the biodiversity and health of their ecosystem. Rather than putting the two at odds like a modern logger, horticultural techniques put human welfare and ecological health in tandem. … they took their responsibilities seriously: to give back to the land more than they took from it. … The “Noble Savage” is not ennobled by any kind of innate moral superiority, but by a way of life that fundamentally works. Ethical injunctions always fail, because they pit a bad conscience against self-interest. Working societies channel self-interest in directions that are sustainable. Primitive societies don’t give back more than they take because the people are so much kinder and better than we are; they do so because that’s what their societies are structured to accomplish, as systems. What they might deride as “low population density, inefficient technology and lack of profitable markets,” might more accurately be termed human-scale societies, simple, elegant technologies, and an emphasis on people over products in a gift economy. Of course this wasn’t the result of “conscious efforts at conservation.” Such efforts invariably fail. Their success laid in precisely the fact that it was not conscious, and that they weren’t efforts at conservation, but efforts to build wealth and prosperity for them, their children, their community, and the non-human communities they lived with.

At the heart of agricultural philosophy, however, is a desire to escape this system: to have life, and never death; growth, and never decay; health, and never sickness. In the end, it is a fool’s dream doomed to failure, but the longer it goes on, the more death, decay, and sickness is needed to balance out the folly.

We have been trained to think of violence as “wrong” since birth, because it is essential for the state’s continued existence that we accept the myth of its legitimacy, and the founding premise of that so-called legitimacy, the monopoly of force. Only by turning violence into an “evil” thing in the same way we demonize the Trickster can we willingly shed ourselves of such a natural function of animal life. Only then can we believe in the monopoly of force—and only then are we willing to accept its dominance over us, and the mythology of “legitimacy,” whereby our natural born freedom is relegated to “rights” for the state to arbitrarily grant or deny, seems not only reasonable, but the way things should be. Without accepting first that violence is “wrong,” none of the systems of control and domination follow.

Not put aside when work was being done, infants remained constantly in touch with the activities of life around them, their tiny hands ever reaching out to whatever items or materials were in use, and onto the hands, arms, and muscles of the users. In this way even as tiny babes-in-arms they began accumulating a kinesthetic familiarity with the implements and activities of life. This familiarity, supplemented by a rapidly developing ‘tactile-talk,’ produced in toddlers an ability to manage objects and materials safely that might be dangerous elsewhere. When first sojourning in those southern hamlets, I was repeatedly aghast to see toddlers barely able to stand upright playing with fire, wielding knives, and hefting axes—without concern by anyone around. Yet they did not burn down their grass/bamboo abodes or chop off their toes and fingers.

Humans never evolved to eat grains, yet we eat them almost exclusively. Even people who remain entirely civilized in all other respects but adopt a “Paleo Diet” eschewing grains note remarkable improvements in health. … All of this points to the shocking conclusion that when the human body is used in its proper evolutionary context, it is capable of the same amazing feats as other animals.

We don’t need to sacrifice; we’ve already sacrificed too much. We need to demand more. We need to take our humanity back.

Eberhard