Is humanity’s need to control nature ultimately working against us? Are the modern ecological crises we face today the inevitable result of the accelerating technologization of society? Can we conclude that what appears to be widespread anomie, as evidenced, for example, by the now almost monthly school shootings in the United States, and the genocidal totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century both have their “premises, dynamics, or preconditions” (169) in industrialization’s alienation of mankind from nature? In “Why Primitivism?” John Zerzan hopes to convince us that the answers to these questions are yes. Through a nuanced critique of both modernity and the thoughts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ canonized intellectual Left, Zerzan draws the conclusion that we should look far back into human pre-history to find solutions to the problems that face humanity in the present. In this post, I will explore the primitivist position and provide a critique of Zerzan’s thought using Slavoj Žižek’s explorations into ecology’s ideological character.

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