Civilization is not your friend

On periodical cicadas and living against the machine

“We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional /commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.” — Morris Berman

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” —Henry David Thoreau

Photo by Laura Gilchrist

I borrowed (and modified) the title of this essay from the title of a Terence McKenna speech, Culture and Ideology Are Not Your Friends, which the famous ethnobotanist delivered to the Whole Life Expo in April 1999. In the speech, McKenna discusses the dangers of blindly adopting ideologies and points to the cult-like nature of what we call culture. There is technically a difference between culture and civilization, though the two terms are often used interchangeably. Civilization refers to the state of the systems of a particular culture. Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and customs of a particular group. Put simply, culture informs civilization. The state of our civilization depends on the priorities of our culture. One of the purposes of this essay is just to acknowledge how fucked up our cultural priorities seem to be. More on this in a moment. First, bugs.

The cry of the 13-year cicada wanes at last on the farm I call home. Other than a few fumbling individuals, the alien invaders have nearly dissipated, retreated into the dirt for another baker’s dozen. They started emerging in early April like some bizarre iteration of the Hopi origin myth, leaving the lawn full of aerated holes, adorning the understory with ornaments of crispy copper exoskeletons, belting their vibratory sex hymn, making themselves known on every shrub and hardwood tree, on every square foot of earth. I read that the most ever recorded (by estimated guess) was 1.5 million per acre. I assume that this was somewhere north of here where the ranges of multiple broods are more likely to cross. Whatever the case, Brock Farm in April became a mini-epicenter for the cicada blossom of 24. We hosted, I would guess, a million beautiful individuals in the acre around the farmhouse.

I heard for a while that there would be a cicada apocalypse in Georgia this year, that two broods, one of the 17-year variety and one of the 13-year variety, would emerge simultaneously for the first time since 1803. This, as far as I can tell from the brood maps, was about as trustworthy as teen gossip. The only place that the two broods meet (and from what I understand, they’re not on the same emergence timeline) is in central Illinois. The two cicada emergences of 24 were never destined to cross paths in Georgia. The 17-year cicada emerging this year (Brood XIII) is known as the Northern Illinois Brood, and indeed, that is where it invades. The brood that did emerge in Georgia in April, Brood XIX of the 13-year cycle (there are multiple broods per cycle) is known as the Great Southern Brood, and indeed, it is great and (mainly) southern.

As the cicadas began to swarm this spring, it didn’t take long for our initial amazement to turn to bewilderment and frustration. It became clear rather quickly that for eight weeks, this land would belong to cicadas—we’d just be living here.

One evening while my daughter, Lula, was playing on her tree swing out back, I heard her start crying. “Stupid cicadas!” she yelled. When I walked out back, she explained, teary-eyed, that the little creeps were all over the maple tree and that a few had flown down and landed on her when she was trying to start swinging. By the end of the first week, the collective chirr of the cicadas turned from interesting, exciting even, to disruptive. A friend who had a similar situation around his house measured the height of their cry at 84 decibels. After work each day, I spend at least an hour in my front yard walking around barefooted looking at plants. On off days, I tend to spend most of my free time outside. The cicadas became so loud so quickly, and unlike annual cicadas, which mainly yell in the afternoons and evenings in late summer, these sang from morning until night, reaching their terrible zenith at midday. (I guess if you’re only around for two months every 13 years, you get what you can while you can.) For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t handle the penetrating scream of these transient bugs. They drove me indoors. And even inside, their cry was a softer but ever-present hum. There was no escaping! I did some research and found that a sustained sound of 85 decibels can cause hearing loss.

I was in the shower one Saturday afternoon listening to part of a Sadhguru lecture on how our labels of good and bad are the root of our suffering—on how inconveniences and even emotional turmoil contribute positively to the meaning and direction of our lives. After I paused the lecture, I could hear the cicada chirr ringing through the bathroom window. I recalled the advice of Sadhguru to suspend judgment in the face of something challenging you. Here I had been, for many days, cursing the shrill sounds of our temporary guests. But they were temporary. I claim (quite a lot) to be an admirer of nature, but I had allowed this very natural, very interesting set of circumstances to bug me (pun intended). The cicadas were obviously quite raucous (understandable to be annoyed by that), but it bothered me that I had simply judged them and moved on. Where was my sense of curiosity? Who even was I anymore? I had read that amateur entomologists travel across the country to witness events like the one happening in my backyard.

That night, when the noise died down, I grabbed a flashlight and asked Lula to walk around the yard with me. I wanted to see if we might find some cicadas mid-metamorphosis. She was disinterested at first, but I explained that these insects wouldn’t be around for long and that they looked super weird coming out of their shells. She agreed to come and we spent the next hour investigating all the shrubs around the house. All of them, camellia, native azalea, grancy greybeard, and others, as well as the small trees in the yard, dogwood, myrtle, and ginkgo, teamed with exoskeletons. After making our way from the back of the house, we came upon a happening scene on the gardenia bush beside our porch. “Wow, look!” Lula exclaimed, “This one is white!” A new adult cicada, its body colorless and malleable, clung to the back of its nymph casing. Its eyes glazed a pale pink, a contrast with the blazing red of mature adults, its body a yellowish off-white, its translucent wings gleamed like metal. We thought it might be albino but confirmed it wasn’t after locating a few other ghostly individuals in the throes of transformation.

The next day, Lula and I chased cicadas around the yard, laid on our backs watching them swim through the treetops, inspected a group of them huddled on the side of a crepe myrtle, and commented on their wild colors—their wings outlined in bright orange. I picked up one and let it crawl down my arm and Lula did the same. We listened to the great noise with intention, labeled it as really not all that bad and rather interesting when you listened closely. There was this general harmony, like a tide rising and falling, amongst the crooning male cicadas (only the males sing, for in the philosophy of their species, there is only one reason to sing), but then there were these glorious fluctuations against the background harmony, spastic and artistic even, the high pitches of bold individuals that lashed out and rose above the hum, that painted a banner of wildness on the day, that said to the world, here we are, deal with it. It was these fluctuations that I began to pay the most attention to as Lula and I made peace with our new friends. We also agreed that, even as temporary guests, the cicadas were sometimes annoying.

13-year Great Southern Brood cicada fresh out of its nymph shell.

Cicadas spend most of their lives in nymph stage boring tunnels underground, feasting on the sap and fluids of tree and plant roots, known as xylem. For the brood that appeared in Georgia this spring, that’s 13 years in darkness, two months above the surface to complete the cycle. Maybe this explains why they always look drunk in their adult form. They wobble like they just left the corner tavern at happy hour. Most of their landings seem off-target. I don’t think they intentionally land on people, for instance, but at the height of the bloom, it only took a few minutes standing outside to become a runway. The 17-year cicada spends all that time, nearly two decades, digging around roots in darkness. Previously, I had thought they must be in some sort of hibernation underground, like tiny cryogenic space travelers.

Contemplating the life cycle of the 13-year cicada sent me down a strange rabbit hole. The idea that one of their survival strategies was to totally inundate a place with themselves—predators had an all-you-can-eat buffet and still couldn’t keep up—amazed me. What would it have taken evolutionarily to get there? My mind began to draw parallels between my world, my society, and there’s. The symbolism of metamorphosis, of great and necessary change, kept returning to me. This idea of spending so much of your life in darkness before emerging onto the stage of the surface, the full blossoming of your genetics realized, only to hang on a tree eating tree juice, only to mate and die, and then have your offspring crawl back into the ground for another 13 years. I became enamored with this idea, and at times was afraid that, like Gregor Samsa, I might wake one morning as a “monstrous vermin.”

What if humanity was in a long nymph stage? Not literally underground but in a kind of darkness—in a kind of sleep. I read a marvelous book years ago, The Twilight of American Culture, which still haunts me almost daily. The quote at the beginning of this essay, the one by Morris Berman, is from that book. In it, Berman, a thorny and wise social critic and expat (he escaped the culture he so loathed in 2006 to become a Mexican citizen), paints an ominous prophetic portrait of our civilization’s near-future. The amazing thing is that the book was published in 2000, previous to 9/11, and still, Berman’s appraisal of what one could expect in the US over the next twenty years (I read the book in maybe 2015) is nearly spot on. He argued that the US and much of the west was then entering a dark age—the irony being that the amount of information and the speed of communication was much faster than in any dark age of the past. This, according to Berman, would be an age of corporate buy-outs of our public institutions, an age of classical liberalism losing ground to nationalistic and socialistic populism (He even described in detail the rise of a Trump-like leader as well as others, equally as ridiculous, on the left), an age of continued public disconnection with nature and widespread destruction of ecosystems for the purpose of infinite economic growth, an age in which fringe conspiracy theories became mainstream, when masses of people would lose touch with history and would not be able to agree with one another on basic scientific facts, an age of loss in literacy, and a population so dumbed down and distracted by technology, so brainwashed by comfort and entertainment—in a kind of sleep—that they would be unable and unwilling to do anything about it.

What if, like cicadas, we humans felt that a great and necessary change was our destiny, but because of the dominating presence of our culture, because of the lowly state of technological civilization, which threatens us with any number of apocalyptic outcomes—climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence, nuclear holocaust, etc.—, we might never see the light of day? What if, as a reaction to these threats, humanity was to wake up, only too late, in fragmented reactionary measures, to see ourselves burned up or fizzled out or blown to bits, or poisoned to death, after only an hour in the sun? Would we be able to plant seeds, to plant ourselves like nymphs in the earth, to make way for a better day for our species, or even for its mere continuation?

The more I pondered these questions, and the more I observed cicadas, the more I thought of our own potential metamorphosis, and the more I returned to my initial reaction to the cicada song. Had I been tamed by the comforts of this age? Had I become so entitled as to complain about something so natural? I heard lots of other people complaining about the cicadas, but people always complain about everything. I wasn’t like them, right? There was no way that I would allow consumer culture to invade my mind like that, to demand convenience, was there? As I’ve explored in other essays, at this stage in my life, I am on guard against such troublesome transformations. I want to remain joyful, curious, idealistic, rugged, willing to sleep outside—I want to honor my higher self with learning and my savage self with experience, and I want to know that each is sacred. I don’t want to be some soft sad suburban creature. I want to be free of all that. But am I?

I am on guard because I’ve seen this negative transformation happen in many cool and interesting people I’ve known—the long stretch toward security, toward voluntary slavery, giving up the fight, giving up their dreams, losing touch with the path to connection and fulfillment. They get a little older and suddenly they’re an investment banker or an insurance salesman. And I want to tell them that nothing on this planet can be insured. I have seen folks who were once at home in the woods, who took risks, who had fun, who would spend days mountaineering across wilderness areas become confined to their recliners, remote controls, and bags of cheetos. Men and women with once active bodies now with potbellies staring down their nose through reading glasses into cell phone screens, pressing the damned buttons one at a time with their index finger like some stoned geezer. (Nothing wrong with reading glasses, to be clear.)

I did not come here to poke fun at old, tired people or to only call our civilization bad names. There are many aspects of civilization I enjoy. The information database known as the internet for instance. Books. Chocolate. Coffee. Salt, etc. There are of course many positive trends in our society. But none of those outweigh or significantly challenge the direction of our civilization. I’m here only to acknowledge that it is clear to me that our civilization does not have (or at least no longer has) our best interest in mind. Industrial society seems to move out in front of us now with total disregard for future generations, in complete disrespect for nature, for the systems of life that actually sustain us, in a path of untold destruction, the consequences of which, I believe, we are not yet fully aware, but of which, we are beginning to see signs. The system knows of the danger it poses but is unable to change for fear of profit loss. Our system has set such an unnatural stage that most people are sickly, exhausted, anxious, and depressed.

Berman’s solution for civilizational decline is what he calls the “Monastic Option.” In his book, he tells the story of how a group of Catholic monks in Ireland, during the European dark ages, might’ve inadvertently preserved our culture’s knowledge of antiquity. They hand-wrote copies of the histories and stories of ancient Greece and Rome solely to practice their Greek and Latin. In so doing, they salvaged the foundational legacy of western values from ruination at the hands of the then terroristic church-state, which, indirectly, allowed the works of old to re-emerge at the dawn of the European Enlightenment. Berman suggests that each of us, individually, can play the role of these monks, saving and sowing the seeds of true civilization—that we can self-educate, live intentionally, and each become teachers of real liberal values, so that one day, like a nymph long-buried, those values might re-emerge in the world. Each of us can be a monk, in other words, that records this vital story.

I agree with Berman on many levels—that we as individuals can plant the necessary seeds of change, or that we can be like the seeds ourselves. It is hard to imagine the general direction of our civilization changing on its own, or to imagine humanity waking up in any collective sense, short of cataclysm. Consumer culture is deeply embedded in even the most conscious of us. It takes a lot of will power and vigilance and placing yourself in inconvenient situations to really live against the grain. Where I deviate from Berman—and to be fair, I could be misreading him here—is in his honoring of Enlightenment ideals. Even as I cherish many of those ideals, I can’t see them returning to save us from our current situation. Technology is a tide too strong for that. People aren’t going to return to physical books and writing by hand because it’s a noble way to live. Also, it must be mentioned that Enlightenment reasoning, which heavily relied on rational thinking, which gave us such grand operating systems as the Cartesian worldview, seems to have laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution, for the objectification of nature, and for the subjugation of indigenous people around the world. If it were up to me (and it is up to me for my own life), I would try to return to the wisdom of those indigenous people, who were the first victims of abuse in this civilization’s march toward “progress.”

Civilization is like a friend or romantic partner who keeps mistreating you. You know its wrong to go back, but maybe you do because of desire or convenience. I’m not saying we should live outside of civilization completely, that we should move into caves and give up all our possessions, or that we should literally plant ourselves in the earth. But I am saying, we should recognize the cycle of abuse—that we have been made mad, strung out, and lonely because of our participation with this ghastly way of living. Civilization needs to be balanced with more natural ways. Each of us chooses the degree of our relation to our culture. Some people are fully participating in culture—it is their sole identity to do so. Some of us, understanding the danger in this, are seeking detachment, or at least trying to balance our time in society with time in nature, with solitude and simplicity.

There are many ways to live against this machine of civilization, which isn’t civil. The first and most obvious thing I can think of is food. The anti-civ individual is one who avoids all processed foodstuffs pushed out by the chemical-pharma-industrial farming complex. The processed food of this civilization is pure poison. It doesn’t take a genius to realize this. We are what we eat, and we should seek to eat all-natural, preferably organic whole foods, and meals made without the use of prepackaged materials. When we consume the drug-like foodstuffs this civilization pushes out, we become half-witted, half-dead zombie people. Haven’t you seen it? What we eat is either our health or the undoing of our health. We have no vitality without good food and good soil. We should seek food from local regenerative sources, not contributing to the food systems that so unnecessarily move goods around the planet, but more importantly, we should forage, grow our own food, replenish our own soils, feed nature around us, become our own farmers, our own medicine keepers, our own healers. We should seek to preserve foods in ways that do not rely on this civilization—ways that this civilization can never touch. Food in nature is a seasonal delight. This seems like a clear step one.

To lump the others together for sake of space, for volumes and tomes could be written on living against the machine, the anti-civ individual sees the illusion of materialism and does not seek it out. This isn’t to say they have no possessions or choose voluntary poverty necessarily, but they understand that simple beauty is best, and they don’t sacrifice their life for the sake of production and consumption. They are never too attached to the ways in which they use civilization; they can live without it. I love chocolate and coffee, yes, but not if their extraction is damaging to people and nature—I can go without. Living is what is dear; things come and go. The anti-civ individual sees the benefit of art and creativity, of curiosity and wonder, of connection with self and other, and seeks a way of life with good intentions for all. Art extends from this person naturally, in the way water flows from a spring. They realize their art, not as a moral obligation, but as an act of love. They realize that love is a way of being, a way of seeing the world. And weirdness, in a “normal” culture, is key. Instead of a mowed lawn, plant native grasses. Provide spaces for wildlife. Plant trees everywhere and honor them as they grow. Talk to plants for God’s sake. Love them, touch them. Do things that don’t make rational sense if they make you happy, if they contribute to the vibrancy of your life. These things, you will find, contribute to the goodness of all of us. Be your weird self and don’t listen to the normies, who are already dead.

The last and most important of these anti-civ measures is to live a life close to nature, which is the source of life, the thing from which we all come, the source of the one true spirituality, and the elemental base that sustains us. We need to be spending more time in nature than we are in civilization. We need to see the beauty this world has to offer and live wrapped in its splendor. We need to walk barefooted on the earth and to touch it with our hands. It isn’t a goddamn display in a museum; it something to be held and cherished and replenished. Nature desires our participation. The anti-civ individual participates, does not call wildflowers weeds, does not call snakes poisonous, does not call loud cicadas harsh names. When they emerge, he or she celebrates their arrival. The anti-civ individual is ceremonial and intuitive, knows that the cicadas are not invaders or even temporary guests. We are the guests. We have two ears and one mouth; we should shut up and listen.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading through all my rambling. I just want to throw out a quick invitation to a really cool event. Tomorrow night, June 8th, at 6pm in Atlanta, I’ll be reading part of one of my essays to kick off the opening of my friend Rebecca Payne’s art exhibit. Rebecca is a true anti-civ individual and her art speaks directly to what I’ve tried to explore in this essay, the necessity of a human-nature connection. Please come if you’re in the area!