Excuse me a moment.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
gasp
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa.
Oh, christ. That’s a good one. Dylan Evans – remember him? – has ever such a good idea. He’s going oop north with his cat to live in the mud, no I mean he’s going oop north with his cat to set up Utopia. And a very nice Utopia it does sound.
He has banned TV and mobile phones, but sanctioned the internet (because he believes that the web could re-knit itself after a disaster). Medicines are fine (“this is play-acting, not religious cult”), and if the community collectively decides to import other conveniences, that’s OK too…Evans will be converting a barn (on farmland belonging to a friend) for communal living, erecting yurts, and installing toilets and solar-powered showers. He has already visited eco-villages, ashrams and monasteries to see how other “intentional communities” operate…“Our wild, or primary, nature, which has been stunted by the way we live today, is much more trustworthy than we think. And it flourishes brilliantly in our natural habitat. Look at the way hunter-gatherers make decisions, punish transgressors and counter dominant people — they know how to put people in their place. I want to explore whether those social mechanisms will work.”
Can’t you just not wait to stay away from that? I sure can! Dylan Evans is a funny, funny guy. I’ve said it all along. JS said he was sane once upon a time, but that was clearly a good long while ago.
“I began to think: could the same thing happen to our industrialised civilisation? So far, hundreds of civilisations have collapsed — why do we think ours is immune? And what would life be like in the aftermath? It suddenly struck me that such a collapse might not actually be a bad thing. It would be terrible while it happened because millions of people would die, which is obviously horrible, but those who survive might have the best chance of creating Utopia that we’ve ever had. I realised that if I was going to explore this issue, I’d have to act it out.”
Oh dear. Shame about the millions. Terrible, terrible; dear oh dear. Now – now that that’s out of the way; god damn, mama, what fun! We get to create Utopia! Yurts! Internet! No tv! Pizza! No hamburgers! Dishwashers! No stoves! Everything just perfect how I like it, with lots of this and none of that, according to my preference, oh boy oh boy oh boy, I can’t wait.
Hahahahahahaha.
Comments
24 responses to “How Green Was My Yurt”
At least he calls it play-acting. Somehow I suspect that the knowledge, on the part of his Utopians, that they can return to civilisation if they get fed up (indeed, will have to when it disbands after 18 months), will result in something other than what might transpire if the same people gathered in the same conditions after a genuine Apocalypse, knowing that no such option existed anymore. In fact, I suspect the difference would be pretty radical, which makes it all rather useless as a test of anything.
Where, oh, where is Karl? We could have a competition to suggest similar strange things that other people who have annoyed us could suddenly do. Things that Steve Fuller could do with or without Madeleine Bunting, for example. Or “Michael Ruse evolves into…”
Oh yes, Dylan Evans.
Did some good stuff once upon a time. He wrote an OK popular introduction to Evolutionary Psychology (which I seem to remember pissed off Steven Rose for some reason or other). But then he started to go a bit loopy (not yet as mad as Rupert Sheldrake, but maybe in a few more years he’ll be in that sort of camp). It’s an interesting dynamic when very smart people lose it…
People living in isolation in a remote Scottish location with limited resources? It’s all been done before. The experiment proved that what happens is that humans end up wanting to kill each other and become unable to communicate except through lawyers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/585559.stm
blurt
The comments are even funnier than the article.
“It’s an interesting dynamic when very smart people lose it…”
Speaking of Steve Fuller, I’m told by a smart fella who went to the same high school (a year or two behind Fuller) that he was a conspicuously smart fella then – so he’s another one of those.
OB, agree with the sentiments, but I am a little disturbed by the hahahahaha. Shouldn’t it be Hohohohohoho? A merry laugh. The haha laugh,which was favored in the letters of Jack the Ripper, is a little too cruel. Although to be fair, Woody the Woodpecker favored haha too. But wasn’t Woody a practical joking kind of bird? There is also the very popular hehe, which, somehow, seems like the way a dog would laugh if a dog laughed. A short snort.
One of the other funny things about it is this notion that there is an optimum level of technological advancement at which human beings should live. Am I wrong in thinking that pretty much all human societies have always lived at the highest technological level they could achieve and that the idea that we should use less than all of our skills (so as not to lose touch with our primitive side) is a relatively new wrinkle?
Puts me in mind of Douglas Adams explaining the big step forward we took. When the weather turned colder, instead of waiting a few generations for our body hair to grow thicker again, we saw another creature that had already evolved a nice thick coat and decided we’d take it off him and use it ourselves.
What Evans is both wilfully and selectively ignoring is that the trait that got us to where he’d like to retreat from is very fundamental to our human nature. What he’d like to revert to isn’t any more essentially human than what we already have. Hasn’t it also been asserted that the more “primitive” societies included a far larger dose of fairly random violent death than we presently have to put up with?
Well, there’s the Amish of course. I’m not sure what their justification for low-tech living is, presumably theological.
More generally, this kind of thinking goes back at least to ca. 1930 — I’m reading a lot of pre-WWII novels about catastrophic aerial bombing of cities (for my PhD research), and some of these writers clearly think it would be no bad thing to get blasted back to the medieval age (not the stone age of course, that wouldn’t be fun at all!) In part, it’s probably a hang-over from Victorian medievalism, the Pre-Raphaelites and all that. Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) would be a contemporary example of this kind of thinking. But you could probably also point to the Luddites earlier in the 19th century …
It’s not that I meant there were no examples one could point to (though whether any of them achieved Utopia is yet another question), it’s the notion that no matter what kind of “progress” we’re capable of, there’s a decent place where one should call a halt. I suspect somewhere in my subconscious I’m sensing a link between the “let’s not go any further or let’s even go backwards” crowd and the notion that we didn’t evolve and are continuing to do so, but were created to be at a certain level and we ought not to rock the boat.
If this is paradise/ I wish I had a lawnmower…
I think it’s also funnier when people make grand statements about what they’re about to do without, rather than just quietly dropping what they find unnecessary. A bit of “I think the obsession with the media is excessive and has made our world unhealthy and I intend to let everyone know about these views of mine through the media.”
roger, hohoho? You must be joking. You want me to do a Santa Claus here?
I take your point about Woody’s spoiling haha for the rest of us, but it can’t be helped. As for hehe, it’s too much like heehee, which I find unendurably girly.
I know, about the Internet and meds. I was going to do a follow-up on that. Where the hell does he think they came from?! Outer space? He’s excited at the prospect of seeing the infrastructure collapse, and thinks he’ll still be able to get meds and the Internet – ! It’s mind-boggling. Or else just lung-emptyingly funny.
It is true that we are now in a position to tinker with our own evolution. But we were not in a position to tinker with the evolution that got us to that point. Neither as a species, nor as individuals within that species, could we consciously control the processes that permitted us to progress to the point where we had such enormous power to be wielded for what we may regard as good or evil, nor could we prevent that same intellectual equipment from wondering whether we should use that power at all.
We can reproduce at an age far below that at which we normally attain the maturity most of us consider necessary for responsible parenthood. So, too, is our capacity for discovery and invention far beyond our capacity to use those skills responsibly or “humanely.” This is what blind watchmakers tend to achieve. The one “responsible” for us doesn’t care whether young parents are good or not, nor does it care whether we blow ourselves to smithereens with our clever gadgets. We are able to do some calculation in advance, which natural selection can’t, and realise that a certain education could alleviate the former problem, just as a certain self-education could defuse the latter. Pretending we can make the problems go away by abstinence/Luddism helps to ensure we won’t evolve reliable inner mechanisms to deal with them in the long term, because the survivors are more likely to be found among the descendants of the parents who educated and the societies that figured out strategies for harnessing the inevitable technologies in non-self-destructive ways.
Nick’s mention of the Centre for Alternative Technology deserves an acknowledgement. It’s a great institution and in a beautiful part of the world. I have bought some of my favourite clothes from Peter Snow’s excellent shop in Machynllyth.. yes, I know they make me look like a geriatric hippy, but at least I stand out amongst the crowds of casual shirts, untucked to conceal bulging waistlines; and what is it with fold over collars on casual shirts anyway?
MikeS. Machynllyth Shirts ? Folk Festivals ? You’ll be telling me you write to the Guardian next and miss dearly departed John Peel ;-)
[coldly] Is there something wrong with looking like a geriatric hippy?
snerk, snort, snuffle
You do realise, I hope, that I use the term ‘geriatric hippy’ as a playfully self-deprecatory gesture meant to demonstrate that I am really nothing of the sort…. really….
John Peel on music – peerless.
John Peel on ‘Home Truths’ – pointless.
Yers of course I realize. I am offended just the same.
Mind you, my hair is way too short for the geriatric hippy look. Plus there’s the bad-tempered scowl, the incredulous sneer, the truculent hunch, the withering glare. None of it really adds up to any kind of hippy look, neither geriatric nor yooffull, I have to admit. But I’m not going to pass up a chance to be offended merely on the trifling grounds that you weren’t talking about me.
Don’t diss the Luddites, Brett. They were fine with hi-tech, just against getting sent to the workhouse by it. For a better take on early nineteenth century ‘modern primitivism’, check out the Eglington Tournament. And for the long-hoped for end of civilisation, check out Linquist’s _history of bombing_ or Heinlein’s _Farnham’s Freehold_.
Evans needs to get hold of a copy of the classic Comic Strip episode _Summer School_. That’ll make him think twice.
Have you seen Evans’ self-authored “biography“? (I like the chatty domain name.) He admits to having got these ideas from Theodore Kaczynski, of whom he says:
I am plodding through Kaczynski’s manifesto at the moment. I sincerely doubt that it is “the most incisive critique of modern civilisation ever written, even more penetrating in its analysis of modern life than the works of Marx, Durkheim, or Weber”; it has the character of many other one-sided rants available on the Web.
But I hope, since there doesn’t seem to be too much chance of Kaczynski’s being forgotten, that he is remembered for passages like this:
and this:
Logical fallacies ahoy! (I’m sure that that passage also demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of genetics but I’m no authority.)
Passages like this apparently persuaded Evans against the further development of artificial intelligence:
If Douglas R. Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (one of the best books ever written, in my humble opinion), is correct, artificial intelligences of equivalent complexity to human intelligences would probably only be as good at decision-making as humans (the argument is along these lines, although it’s a few years since I’ve read it: human brains can perform calculations with perfect accuracy at the neuronal level but that doesn’t stop individual humans being crap at maths; the same will probably apply to artificial intelligences based on computers.) Even now, computers can’t be trusted to solve basic arithmetical equations accurately. That Evans fell for this nonsense only shows his poor understanding of his own academic field.
Since Kaczynski states (correctly, probably because it’s blindingly obvious) that “when revolutionaries or utopians set up a new kind of society, it never works out as planned”; I am forced to query Evans’ reading comprehension. Perhaps the fact that the author of the “Utopia Project” has no particular plan in mind provides wriggle-room on that point.
Well that includes one of the funniest lines I’ve read in awhile. (Also not funny at all, since he acted on it, but all the same, extremely funny.)
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
Yeah. Amazon US number in six figures again; time to start whacking.
Evans is strange like that, because the stuff he says seems so patently silly.
Just in case Mr Dylan is reading this, and to provide something more helpful than all the sniggering that has gone on so far, I can tell him that in nearby Stornoway he will find some plumbers who have experience with this sort of thing.
http://www.hawes16.freeserve.co.uk/cast17.htm
Excellent research bluejewel. Speaking of which – from the man’s c.v:
” spent a few months at the State University of New York in Buffalo with a prominent Lacanian scholar, but was put off by the terrible weather there …” So, off to Scotland it is then.
From reading the c.v I also suspect the level of exposure to or undarstanding of actual science and technology he has had as being quite minimal (that doesn’t stop the Indy and Grauniad drooling all over him though.) Apart from these points, he makes the perfect candidate for the move up north.
Hopefully, the real highland hippies will temporarily reject time honored pacifist tradition and club him to death with bits of computer.
“It suddenly struck me that such a collapse might not actually be a bad thing. It would be terrible while it happened because millions of people would die, which is obviously horrible, but those who survive might have the best chance of creating Utopia that we’ve ever had. I realised that if I was going to explore this issue, I’d have to act it out.”
Next year, Global Jihad with paintballing.