The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

July 15, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- One of the oddities of the writer’s life is the utter unpredictability of inspiration.

There are times when I sit down at the keyboard knowing what I have to write, and plod my way though the day’s allotment of prose in much the same spirit that a gardener turns the earth in the beds of a big garden; there are times when a project sits there grumbling to itself and has to be coaxed or prodded into taking shape on the page; but there are also times when something grabs hold of me, drags me kicking and screaming to the keyboard, and holds me there with a squamous paw clamped on my shoulder until I’ve finished whatever it is that I’ve suddenly found out that I have to write.

Over the last two months, I’ve had that last experience on a considerably larger scale than usual; to be precise, I’ve just completed the first draft of a 70,000-word novel in eight weeks. Those of my readers and correspondents who’ve been wondering why I’ve been slower than usual to respond to them now know the reason. The working title is Moon Path to Innsmouth; it deals, in the sidelong way for which fiction is so well suited, with quite a number of the issues discussed on this blog; I’m pleased to say that I’ve lined up a publisher, and so in due time the novel will be available to delight the rugose hearts of the Great Old Ones and their eldritch minions everywhere.

None of that would be relevant to the theme of the current series of posts on The Archdruid Report, except that getting the thing written required quite a bit of reference to the weird tales of an earlier era -- the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, of course, but also those of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, who both contributed mightily to the fictive mythos that took its name from Lovecraft’s squid-faced devil-god Cthulhu. One Howard story leads to another -- or at least it does if you spent your impressionable youth stewing your imagination in a bubbling cauldron of classic fantasy fiction, as I did -- and that’s how it happened that I ended up revisiting the final lines of “Beyond the Black River,” part of the saga of Conan of Cimmeria, Howard’s iconic hero:

“‘Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,’ the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. ‘Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.’”

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-cimmerian-hypothesis-part-one-civilization-and-barbarism-john-michael-greer

[Warpy]

1. Sociopaths and people with borderline personality disorder

tend to be the main people dedicated to barbarism. They are a minority, so it's unrealistic to say the whole species tends toward barbarism, not even in the bad old days. Most people spent their lives feeding themselves. While the barbarians among us have always exerted an influence out of proportion to their small number, the main thrust of the race has been to contain such people and thereby contain the amount of damage they can do. This is done by killing them, by jailing them, by putting them into organized armies, or by using them to put on blood sport spectacles. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to treat them so they can live with the rest of us.

It's easy to be pessimistic about the state of the human race while capitalism plays out its end game--again. It's easier to be optimistic when the entire arc of history is examined, especially the work being done here and abroad researching how most people lived.

The best part of this article was its disgust for Rousseau's "noble savage" living in a state of perfect balance with nature, only later corrupted by commerce and religion. I was a nurse in a port of entry and met some of those folks and trust me, they were neither.

Cooperation and interdependence have always been the key to survival, not predation.

[bemildred]

2. Well, the thing about barbarians is they don't overpopulate because they can't.

Lacking the technical means and motive to create surpluses, they remain subject to nature and the natural methods of population control that we prefer to avoid without taking the responsibility on ourselves. Since I really don't want to go back to the non-technical life I think we need to figure our how to regulate our numbers without getting into wars all the time or creating an unfair class system. It's a political problem we need to solve.

We also need to be much more helpful to the primitive peoples that are left on this planet, they have a lot of knowledge we ought to conserve and preseve. We might need them one of these days, and they do have much to teach us about living simple, which is a really good idea, we are way past the boundaries where the law of diminishing returns kicks in when it comes to busyness overload. Creativity requires a lot of free time and creativity is everyones birthright.

And we need to be better custodians of the biosphere we inhabit. It's our job.