David King, founder and chairman of the Seed Library of Los
Angeles, speaks to activists during a protest against agribusiness giant
Monsanto in Los Angeles on May 25, 2013. Marches and rallies against
Monsanto and genetically modified organisms (GMO) food and seeds were
held across the US and in other countries with protestors calling
attention to the dangers posed by GMO food. Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images
In William Gibson’s new work of time-travel speculative fiction,
The Peripheral, there’s a back-and-forth between a woman named Flynne,
who is from our near future, and Wilf, who lives in an alternate future
70 years further on.
At one point Wilf expresses surprise that Flynne’s people still catch
colds and fight infection with antibiotics. In his 22nd century, Wilf
says, the only people who get sick are people who do so deliberately, as
a form of status-seeking.
As Wilf tells Flynne, these are people who don’t quite opt out of
modern civilization so much as they “volunteer for another manifestation
of it, with heritage diseases. Which they then believe make them more
authentic.”
Flynne is incredulous: “Nostalgic for catching colds?”
Wilf replies, “If they could look as though they catch them, but
avoid any discomfort, they would. But others, insisting on the real
thing, would mock them for their inauthenticity.”
Wilf calls these people “neoprimitive cultists,” and in this short,
nifty exchange, Gibson captures the essence of our reigning contemporary
zeitgeist.
Neanderthal
From the paleo diet to the “ancestral health” craze to the criminals
leading the anti-vaccine movement, we live in neoprimitivist times, in
precisely the manner sketched by William Gibson. A disturbingly large
segment of society has adopted a highly skeptical and antagonistic
relationship to the main tributaries of modernity. But as in The
Peripheral, these people are not opting out of modernity, going off the
grid or deciding to live in caves. Instead, they are volunteering for
“another manifestation” of modernity, living in the modern world,
without being entirely of it, or even understanding it.
The moral imperative driving this is what we can call the quest for
authenticity. This is the search for meaning in a world that is
alienating, spiritually disenchanted, socially flattened,
technologically obsessed, and thoroughly commercialized. To that end,
“authenticity” has become the go-to buzzword in our moral slang,
underwriting everything from our condo purchases and vacation stops to
our friendships and political allegiances.
There are two major problems with this.
The first is that authenticity turns out to be just another form of
hyper-competitive status seeking, exacerbating many of the very problems
it was designed to solve. Second, and even more worrisome, is that the
legitimate fear of the negative effects of technological evolution has
given way to a paranoid rejection of science and even reason itself.
Modernity, as a civilization, sits at the confluence of secularism,
liberalism, and capitalism, and it is not everyone’s cup of coffee. The
promise of the authentic is that it will help us carve out a space where
true community can flourish outside of the cash nexus and in a way that
treads lightly upon the Earth. More often than not, this manifests
itself through nostalgia, for a misremembered time when the air was
cleaner, the water purer, and communities more nurturing.
It was never going to work out that way. From its very
origins, the quest for the authentic was motivated by that most ancient
and base of human urges, the desire for status. The authenticity craze
of the past decade is simply the latest version of what the economist
Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class,
called “conspicuous display.” Veblen was mostly concerned with the
pretensions of the failing aristocracy and their obsession with obsolete
endeavours such as hunting, swordfighting, and learning useless
languages. Yet his basic insight – that consumption is first and
foremost about social distinction – remains the key to decoding our
consumer driven cultural shivers.
As recently as a decade and a half ago, organic food was
the almost exclusive bastion of earnest former hippies and young nature
lovers — the sort of people who like to make their own granola, don’t
like to shave, and use rock crystals as a natural deodorant. But by the
turn of the millennium, organic was making inroads into more mainstream
precincts, driven by an increasing concern over globalization, the
health effects of pesticide use, and the environmental impact of
industrial farming. The shift to organic seemed the perfect alignment of
private and public benefit.
In the past few juice cleansing has become a 5 billion dollar
industry in the U.S., appealing to those who want to lose weight and
“detox” their bodies. Frederic J. Brown /
AFP/Getty Images
It also became an essential element of any “authentic”
lifestyle. Yet as it became more popular, the rumblings of discontent
within the organic movement became harder to ignore. What was once a
niche market had become mainstream, and with massification came the need
for large-scale forms of production that, in many ways, are
indistinguishable from the industrial farming techniques that organic
was supposed to replace. Once Walmart started selling organic food, the
terms of what counts as authentic shifted from a choice between organic
and conventional food to a dispute between supporters of the organic
movement and those who advocate a far more restrictive standard for
authenticity, namely, locally grown food.
But when it comes to shopping locally, how local is local
enough? If we want to live a low-impact, environmentally conscious
lifestyle, how far do we need to go?
The short answer is, you need to go as far as necessary to maintain your position in the status hierarchy.
The problem is you can only be authentic as long as most
of the people around you are not, which has its own built-in
radicalizing dynamic. You start out getting an organic-vegetable
delivery service once a month, then you try growing chickens in your
urban backyard. Then the next thing you know, your friends have gone
all-in on paleo, eschewing grains, starches, and processed sugar and
learning how to bow-hunt wild boar on weekends.
The Whole Food chain plans to start rolling out a system that ranks
fruits and vegetables as “good,” ”better” or “best” based on the
supplier’s farming practices. Ha Lam /
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
There’s a deeper issue here though, which is that
the problem with radicalization is that it breeds extremism. It is one
thing to play at being anti-modern by eating only wild game, becoming an
expert in axe-throwing, or building a whisky still in your backyard. It
is something else entirely to push that ethos into a thoroughgoing
rejection of science, technology, and reason itself.
Yet this is where we have ended up. The neoprimitivist
logic of authenticity has pushed its way into every corner of how we
think, act and consume. Coconut water and bone broth are elixirs, while
gluten and vaccines are poisons.
This is magical thinking. We have become obsessed with invisible or
undetectable features of our micro-environment, the alleged negative
effects conjured out of statistical anomalies, anecdotes and ignorance.
Consider the following examples:
– Last week, a small Okanagan fruit company finally received approval
— after almost 20 years of trying — from U.S. regulators for its
“arctic” apple. The apple’s principal selling point is that it doesn’t
turn brown when exposed to the air, which has led consumer groups to
immediately denounce it as “the Botox apple.” Ignore that nothing had
been added or injected into the apple; the company simply figured out
how to switch off the gene that produces the browning enzyme. Anti-GMO
groups in Canada quickly demanded that Health Canada refuse to follow
the American lead on this, despite the fact that the U.S. Department of
Agriculture basically said the new apple was completely harmless.
– Three years ago, Calgary’s city council voted to ban fluoride from
the city’s water supply. As sure as night follows day, dentists told the
CBC before Christmas that tooth decay was now rampant in Calgary’s
children. Wait times to see a pediatric dentist in the city have tripled
from one to three months.
-A decade and a half after it was declared eliminated, the measles is
back in North America. The anti-vaccination movement is gathering
steam, with vaccination rates in many upscale communities in California
and other parts of the continent falling well below the 95 per cent
needed for herd immunity.
A sign warns of the dangers of measles in the reception area of a
pediatrician’s office in Scottsdale, Ariz.,, Feb. 7, 2015. Health
officials in the state continue to see cases of the disease which had
been eradicated in the U.S. Tom Stathis /
AP
The growing resistance to agricultural breakthroughs and
long-standing public health initiatives takes place not despite
a scientific consensus that they are safe, but in many cases because of
those assurances. We have become techno-mysterians, living in a world we
don’t understand. We happily play with our smartphones all day, and
spend all night worrying that they are giving off rays that are causing
depression.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted that the misfortunes that
can befall humanity can be sorted into two broad categories: things
that are inflicted by nature, and things that are inflicted by humans.
For most of our history, a great deal of suffering was due to natural
causes such as famine, disease, and disaster. But as we have developed
in knowledge and skill, the class of harms inflicted upon humans by
other humans has come to occupy a greater chunk of the total. Put
simply, there is less disease but more war, and as a result, we’ve come
to believe that “nature” is relatively benign, while “civilization” is
increasingly a threat.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet we are caught in the
grip of a fierce nostalgia, where the thought of contracting a disease
like the measles is not something to be feared, but to be welcomed as a
sign of our profound connection to nature.
We live in neoprimitivist times. Authenticity seeking wedded to
technophobic irrationalism has led us to a bizarre situation where we
are increasingly ignorant and suspicious of the scientific and
technological underpinnings of our world. It’s like fish deciding that
water is their enemy.
