I hope you understand enough about technology to know that a pre-industrial economy could not even begin to support the world’s existing population. It would be highly unlikely that even one-forth of the world’s present inhabitants could survive by means of hunting, gathering or rudimentary farming. So when your Back to Nature advocates speak of returning to man’s “Eden,” what they are really endorsing is the extermination of billions of people on a scale more horrendous than anything in mankind’s bloody past.
I would suggest that those who propose to “save the planet” by depriving man of his tools of survival are hypocritically enjoying the benefits of five millennia of civilization while insulting the very process that provides them with the means to win thousands of gullible followers.
I think their point is more that these people are going to die anyway, unless something is done. People like Daniel Quinn dont advocate primitivism purely out of some kind of hatred of technology/capitalism - they do so because they believe the current strategies we are pursuing simply are not going to work. Quinn often makes the claim that the the models of society which we have been pursuing for the last 4000 years do not constitute an evolutionary stable strategy, and that we are not going to survive as a civilised species unless we make radical changes. One of his main arguments in support of his claims is the combinatorial explosion of the world’s population - its not a case of ‘he wants X billion to die so that he can live in a jungle’, its more that he believes these people ARE going to die because the world simply isnt big enough to support them. The population of Earth is increasing exponentially, and unless something drastic happens, there are probably going to be serious population problems 50-100 years down the line.
The other main line of support for his claims are the ever-growing liklihood of nuclear armaggedon, or large-scale chemical warfare. 70 years ago the atom bomb did not exist, yet it is now possible for an isolated group of terrorists to get hold of one. As we move into the future, it seems that it is going to become increasingly easy for a weapon of mass destruction to fall into the wrong hands, and if this starts to become a regular occurence, it is difficult to imagine a disaster being avoided. A nuclear war is certainly not an ‘arbitrary proposition’, nor does it seem that unlikely.
Our planet has existed for X billion years. Homosapiens have been around for maybe 30,000. Civilisation has been here for 6000 maximum, and ‘technological civilisation’ for only about 400. A civilisation so advanced that it possesses weapons powerful enough to literally wipe out humanity is only 50 years old. Despite the certain sense of inevitability we feel about our progress forwards, it isnt inconceivable that the whole Western experiment is going to end before its 6000th anniversary. This realisation, this honest facing up to the possibility that things are going to end in tears if we continue along the current path, is what I believe motivates a lot of primitivist standpoints. As Quinn points out, primitivism might not be glamorous, but it WORKS. There is no danger of a society of savages accidentally obliterating the entire planet as a consequence of some stupid war. It isnt about what is ‘right’ or ‘moral’, its about what can be realistically be sustained over a long period of time. Maybe high-technological societies just have an expected lifespan of 1000-5000 years maximum, and they only appear in the universe for brief moments before destroying themselves. Hence his invoking Maynard Smith’s idea of evolutionary stable strategies.
I certainly dont agree with Quinn and his ilk on most points and I think his viewpoint suffers greatly from a deep-rooted sense of collectivism, but I think its important to see where they are coming from - there are certainly genuine problems which they discuss. Writing them all off as suffering from some pathological hatred of freedom/science/capitalism/mankind/universal love/whatever doesnt seem particularly useful.
