Customer Reviews

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What a wonderful book! After reading it, I had so many question, I felt the need to talk with the author in person. After tracking down his number, I gave him a call (noting how odd it was to be talking with an "anarcho-primitivist" on the phone) and we arranged to meet the following week.

Within no time, I was down in Eugene, Oregon, walking through the infamous Whitaker district, known for it's vagrants and black-block anarchists, searching for Zerzan's co-op.

After spotting him on the porch, he greated me and invited me into his small, box-shaped house. Asside from a desk and a giant bookcase filled to the brim with old ragtag books and zines, his little house was empty and austere.

Sitting on an old, cleary-secondhand softa, we talked for over an hour about anarchism, ecology, history, technology, society, permaculture, natural farming and ecovillages. Then we took a walk to a local, independent coffee house to chat some more.

What struck me about Zerzan was his humility, patience, kindness, and penchent for critical thought. I mentioned my suprise that he had a telephone, and he agreed, in an ideal world one would not need a telephone. But, he said, he does not have a watch, or any of the other things that weigh us down and distract more than they help. Despite his revolutionary prose, I realized that a certain degree of compromise must be made for those who wish to stay inside civil society and reform it.

Sure, one could pack up and go live in a commune, but how would that help? The global economy would still spin out of control, and people would continue to live in ways that destroy the planet. Aside from the phone (and I have heard now that he sometimes borrows a friend's computer), which keeps him connected to the larger movement as well as curious people like me, Zerzan purposefully chooses to live as "primitive" as possible - a word and way of life he esteems for reasons outlined in this book.

I highly recommend reading RUNNING ON EMPTINESS even if you are an avowed progressive or technophile, if only for the sake of balance. As Zerzan shows, technological progress is not a unilinear process of self-refinement. In many ways it has alienated us from self, other and earth.

For those who have already begun to notice that civilization is not all roses, this book is absolutely essential. There is perhaps no better perspective on this subject. Zerzan will enrich and deepen whatever nascent criticisms you already have, and inspire you to learn more and take action.

A MUST READ

John Zerazan has put together a philosophy that enables us to understand and connect the insanitiy that is playing out before our very lifetimes. Civilizations have been the root foundation for the development of domestication of the human race, turning us into complacent, obediant non-connected beings. Zerzan's references will lead you to greater depths of research drawing you to your own conclusions. As for my own, I fear the worst is yet to come. Welcome to the revolution in reclaming your TRUE freedom. I would love to see a joint project with Derrick Jensen, perhaps reaching out to an even broader audience!
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees of things through narrow chinks of his cavern" (William Blake)

....and for presenting some very provocative challenges to our usual ways of thinking. I'm going to spend some time giving more consideration, for example, to the neo-Luddite insistence that technology is NOT neutral and that technologies based on a division of labor are inherently fragmenting. Hm.

What made this book hard reading for me was its steady tone of blaming: technocrats are idiots, compromisers are cowards, etc. Unfortunately, this judgmental tone, with us since the admirable Muir and perhaps before, is one of the least effective things about anarchistic OR ecological thought. A good example is the author's letter to Marvin Minsky, whom he calls "vermin" and to whom he delivers several other personal insults. This kind of rhetoric precludes all chance at dialog and makes one look to those still on the fence like a well-schooled loudmouth. (I find Minsky's thoughts about the fusion of machine with human downright frightening, extraordinarily arrogant, even apocalyptic....but I've never met the man and would not presume to call him any names until I did....)

By all means let us launch uncompromising and openly outraged attacks on the denial that excuses behaviors and attitudes that clearly harm self, community, and world--but can't we do it without all the self-defeating shaming, finger-pointing, and personal attacks that make us sound more petulant than earnest in our concerns?

As we continue down the numbing path of modern "civilization," the anarcho-primitivist critique becomes more obviously true. As I made my way through Zerzan's essays, a radical split emerged in my consciousness. On the one hand, we're enmeshed in day-to-day struggles and anxieties, the all-consuming attention required just to scrape by and maintain some sense of sanity (and this in one of the more affluent societies on the planet). But Zerzan's stance is like a slap in the face. I began to see just how ridiculous and dehumanizing the entire modern system is. This dissonance between civilization's maximum-seriousness demands and our personal awareness that it's all a huge sham is essentially the substance of alienation, a theme which most liberals have abandoned, but which Zerzan always keeps central. Alienation is still the most explosive analytical tool for confronting our current situation.

Anarcho-primitivism may not have the most useful prescriptive program, but its descriptive power is unparalleled. The anarcho-primitvist goal is certainly utopian, but that is a good thing. Without utopian goals, we can have no transcendent position from which to challenge the present order. The intermediate mechanisms of change, through which we must work toward the utopian anarcho-primitivist future, should be the true program of liberalism. The left has condemned itself to irrelevancy by ignoring its utopian strand in favor of technical tinkering. We must recover our utopian roots in order to bear anarcho-primitivist fruit.

Running On Emptiness is a collection of anarcho-primitivist author Zerzan's essays from recent years ('90s and later) as well as a pun on the title of a Jackson Browne song.

I especially liked the autobiographical essay So...How Did You Became An Anarchist? Zerzan has had quite a life and he proved to be much more of an activist/militant than I had previously thought.

I highly recommend this short book of essays. It's worth the time to read it IMHO.

This should be required reading for anyone who wants to know what civilization is all about. Everyone with any intellectual honesty should read every word that John Zerzan writes. Guaranteed to wake up your brain.

Overall, this was a very interesting, enjoyable book. I was exposed to quite a few concepts that I had never considered before, and feel that reading it was time well spent.

This was my first Zerzan book. I gave it a 4 because I didn't feel qualified to call it perfect. I won't call myself a raving-fan of him, won't be a fan of anyone, but his writing is the most level and rational, and I don't ever recall the book taking "on a rant." That personally turns me off to a writer. He never seemed to label himself an expert or perfect example, was usually very objective to other opinions, and didn't bad-mouth other writers in his dis-agreement with some of their beliefs. Take objectively the couple of negative reviews, the one in particular who got his feathers so ruffled because Zerzan had a different perspective of his beloved "Chomsky." Some say that Zerzan is too radical in that he apparently calls for a total abolition of civilization. Well, if you think all of civilization is bad, and the cause of our present problems, then I would think "all" of it needs to go. A lesser effort, is well, half-ass. You don't fix a heroin addiction by simply using less (no experience in that area.....) All in all, very worth my time, and I'll be getting another book or two of his in the future.

i left this book with a feeling of disappointment. the author doesn't seem to understand that for extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary evidence. certainly the claim that civilization is bad is extraordinary, but the scholarship in this book isnt strong enough to back up this claim. Zerzan could use some rhetoric 101 training in drawing decisive conclusions, as all he does in this book is establish a correlation between the rise of civilization and inequality, etc. but correlation is not causation.its pretty muddled thinking in my estimation, and not really worth reading unless you have to deal with the green anarchy cult.

I've seen plenty of political stances before, but I find this one unusual. Perhaps I've spent too much time reading books by liberals and conservatives.

Zerzan is an anarchist. To him, Noam Chomsky is simply too conservative, maybe reactionary. Now, to some extent, I might agree with that feeling, given that Chomsky has picked up some rather reactionary political allies. And Zerzan does make the point that Chomsky has said little about nature or women. But no, I don't buy the idea that this makes Chomsky just another right-winger. Nor do I agree with, for example, Zerzan's implication that Chomsky (who has said he wants a "two-state" solution in the Levant) is too pro-Israel.

Can a book annoy me to such an extent as to get me to give it a one-star review? Yes. And this book is an example of one that has done so. Zerzan thinks we need to dismantle our overly technological society. And I think that's a very poor idea. If this book had made a reasonable case for doing that, I would judge it less harshly.

In my opinion, bringing down our society would at best send us into a new Dark Ages, removing our rights, freedoms, prosperity, and well-being. It would also get rid of our access to truth and to our means of bettering ourselves. While our species might survive, I suspect that most individuals would die an ugly death, as without modern technology, the planet's population would quickly drop catastrophically. Even the end of the Western Roman Empire wasn't pretty, especially in the British Isles, and the demise of our present society could well be worse.

Yes, much of what our society does uses up non-renewable resources. But I think the answer to that is to use up fewer resources, not to abandon technology! After all, some technology has shown us how to better our lives inexpensively. Even some of the more expensive applications of technology, such as huge advances in the field of medicine, are things that many members of society might feel are worth preserving. And I think a great example of a less costly achievement of our present society is computer-based technology, which has made data storage and retrieval, calculations, and communications far easier. Let's see what Zerzan has to say (in this book, no less) to one of my heroes (Marvin Minsky), a person who has done superb work in a field (the theory of computation) that I think benefits all mankind:

"I believe I am not alone in the opinion that vermin such as you will one day be considered among the worst criminals this century has produced."

Um, wow. I have annoyed people in the past for many reasons, such as my religious views or political views. But I'm more than a little surprised to see such implicit annoyance with the fact that I've taught a couple of computer science courses in which I rather liberally used material from a textbook written by Marvin Minsky! I had to reread this, just to make sure that Minsky was actually being attacked for his scholarly achievements.

I guess that by teaching this subject, I've become an, um, accomplice to Minsky's "crimes." And that makes my failure to recommend this book rather self-serving. But I'll do it anyway.