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Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication
Winner of the 1994 Governor General's Award. "If you buy only one book this decade let it be Rogue Primate." —The Toronto Star
229 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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138 people want to read
About the author
John A. Livingston
27 books3 followersJohn Allen Livingston (November 10, 1923 – January 17, 2006) was a Canadian naturalist, broadcaster, author, and teacher. Livingston was the author of several books, including The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (1981) and the Governor General's Award-winning Rogue Primate (1994). In his later years, he was a professor emeritus of environmental studies at York University.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 23, 2015
Canadian scholar John A. Livingston (1923-2006) was a pioneer in the deep ecology movement, and a notorious rogue thinker. He detested the senseless ecological destruction caused by civilized societies, and blamed this on their humanist ideology, which seemed to be possessed by an insatiable hunger for perpetual growth at any cost — a death wish.
This ideology had poisoned the minds of most modern humans, and it had roots even deeper than religion or politics. Communists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Muslims — all shared a fervent blind faith in human superiority, and our right to ruthlessly plunder the planet to support any and all enterprises that human folly could fancy. Destroying the future was what cool people did. The planet was ours to devour, of course.
Wildlife conservationists, environmental activists, animal rights advocates, spiritual leaders, politicians, and mainstream consumers all earned Livingston’s scorn for their failure to think outside of the humanist box. What a jerk! Cool people never criticize humanism. Consequently, he gained a reputation for being a pessimistic misanthrope, which is why you’ve probably never heard of him.
Pessimist is accurate; like any sane person, he did have “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.” A misanthrope is one with “a hatred, dislike, or distrust of humankind.” Livingston did distrust our species, but he seemed to be a compassionate misanthrope — he hoped that we could get our act together some day, and believed that this was not totally impossible. So, he really wasn’t a nutjob, he was just someone who had a rare gift for being able to see what was clearly obvious.
In Rogue Primate, Livingston discussed the boo-boos of human history, and contemplated the possibility of undoing them. Many thinkers have concluded that agriculture or civilization was the start of our downfall. Livingston believed that the stage for disaster was set long before that, when we invented magical thinking.
In an earlier essay, One Cosmic Moment, Livingston concluded that the development of magic had done far more to damage the future than our adventures in tool-making. Cave paintings and fertility figurines were created to metaphysically encourage successful hunting and abundant game. At this point, we began symbolically controlling nature — from an imaginary position of human superiority. As everyone knows, those who flirt with magic will have to marry it.
The magic act began maybe 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Our cultural evolution became unhitched from our slow-motion genetic evolution, and it moved into the fast lane. We ceased being evolutionary creatures, and became revolutionary. Some have called this transition the Great Leap Forward. At this point, we began accumulating how-to information, which eventually turned us into the loose cannons of the animal world. By and by, we became clever enough to live and prosper almost anywhere.
Wildness was about freedom. Wild animals had no masters or owners. Domestication, on the other hand, was about submission and dependence. Non-human domesticates were selectively bred to be passive, fast growing, and capable of producing abundant offspring. They were dim, infantile creatures who did not blend in with the wild ecosystem. They had lost the ability to survive in the wild, and depended on humans to provide them with food, water, and protection. Humans were the crutch that they could not live without.
Following the Great Leap Forward, humans became highly dependent on a different sort of crutch. Evolution had not elegantly designed us to thrive as ground-dwelling creatures. What we lacked in strength, speed, teeth, and claws we eventually replaced with cleverness. We developed complex language and abstract thinking. We learned how to make and control fire. We became good at cooperation, sharing, tool-making, and hunting. Every useful bit of learning was passed on to the next generation, and our knowledge base snowballed in size and power.
Cleverness became the crutch that we could not live without, our key to survival. As our dependence on learning grew, our own biology became less and less important. The embarrassing result was that humans became the only species to accidentally domesticate themselves, a dangerous and unnatural achievement.
With the emergence of agriculture and civilization, our mindset got much wackier, and we began causing significant ecological damage (while hunter-gatherers continued a low-impact way of life). In the civilized world, the notion of human superiority moved to center stage, and old fashioned ritual magic was replaced with powerful human-like gods and goddesses. The new mindset majored in individualism, competition, and aggression. The entire planet, and everything on it, was absorbed into the human sphere. This gave birth to the humanist ideology, which had now spread to almost every society on Earth.
As domesticated animals, we became excellent followers, obedient hard working servants. We could endure living in high density populations, and spending many hours a day in windowless factories manufacturing frivolous status trinkets. We had an extremely high tolerance for abuse. Alas, our days of wild freedom were behind us, and forgotten.
Some say that there is a window of opportunity, between the ages of 5 and 12, when we are most likely to form vital emotional bonds with nature. A bond with life on Earth is essential for a sane mind. Unfortunately, today’s kids are far more likely to stay indoors and form bonds with technology, which we eagerly encourage. They are dangerously isolated from the family of life, and likely to remain stunted for the rest of their days.
Livingston went on and on, illuminating the various errors of our ways. This was not a celebration the amazing brilliance of humankind (which sounds sillier every year). Instead, he presented us with a coherent explanation of how we got into this mess — a sobering look in the mirror.
The good news is that the core of the problem is thought patterns, and thought patterns can be changed. First, the notion of human superiority must be disemboweled and fed to the ravenous mongrels. It is essential that we once again develop an intimate and respectful relationship with nature. Remember that there was a time when this culture did not exist. We can live without it, and we must.
Many thinkers have come to the same conclusion, that we must radically change the way we think and live. Livingston’s analysis focused attention on domestication, bonding with nature, abandoning dominance relationships, and denouncing the diabolical cult of humanism. He followed a different path, and added some important pieces to the puzzle.
He concluded by prodding his readers: “We, the educated, the informed, the well nourished, the affluent, do pathetically little to stall the human juggernaut.” We need to imagine an alternative way of human being in the world, and we need to stop being silent, passive, tolerant, domesticated sheep. No matter how broken we are, we all still possess traces of undamaged healthy wildness buried deep inside — ancestral memories of better days. Courage!
This ideology had poisoned the minds of most modern humans, and it had roots even deeper than religion or politics. Communists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Muslims — all shared a fervent blind faith in human superiority, and our right to ruthlessly plunder the planet to support any and all enterprises that human folly could fancy. Destroying the future was what cool people did. The planet was ours to devour, of course.
Wildlife conservationists, environmental activists, animal rights advocates, spiritual leaders, politicians, and mainstream consumers all earned Livingston’s scorn for their failure to think outside of the humanist box. What a jerk! Cool people never criticize humanism. Consequently, he gained a reputation for being a pessimistic misanthrope, which is why you’ve probably never heard of him.
Pessimist is accurate; like any sane person, he did have “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.” A misanthrope is one with “a hatred, dislike, or distrust of humankind.” Livingston did distrust our species, but he seemed to be a compassionate misanthrope — he hoped that we could get our act together some day, and believed that this was not totally impossible. So, he really wasn’t a nutjob, he was just someone who had a rare gift for being able to see what was clearly obvious.
In Rogue Primate, Livingston discussed the boo-boos of human history, and contemplated the possibility of undoing them. Many thinkers have concluded that agriculture or civilization was the start of our downfall. Livingston believed that the stage for disaster was set long before that, when we invented magical thinking.
In an earlier essay, One Cosmic Moment, Livingston concluded that the development of magic had done far more to damage the future than our adventures in tool-making. Cave paintings and fertility figurines were created to metaphysically encourage successful hunting and abundant game. At this point, we began symbolically controlling nature — from an imaginary position of human superiority. As everyone knows, those who flirt with magic will have to marry it.
The magic act began maybe 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. Our cultural evolution became unhitched from our slow-motion genetic evolution, and it moved into the fast lane. We ceased being evolutionary creatures, and became revolutionary. Some have called this transition the Great Leap Forward. At this point, we began accumulating how-to information, which eventually turned us into the loose cannons of the animal world. By and by, we became clever enough to live and prosper almost anywhere.
Wildness was about freedom. Wild animals had no masters or owners. Domestication, on the other hand, was about submission and dependence. Non-human domesticates were selectively bred to be passive, fast growing, and capable of producing abundant offspring. They were dim, infantile creatures who did not blend in with the wild ecosystem. They had lost the ability to survive in the wild, and depended on humans to provide them with food, water, and protection. Humans were the crutch that they could not live without.
Following the Great Leap Forward, humans became highly dependent on a different sort of crutch. Evolution had not elegantly designed us to thrive as ground-dwelling creatures. What we lacked in strength, speed, teeth, and claws we eventually replaced with cleverness. We developed complex language and abstract thinking. We learned how to make and control fire. We became good at cooperation, sharing, tool-making, and hunting. Every useful bit of learning was passed on to the next generation, and our knowledge base snowballed in size and power.
Cleverness became the crutch that we could not live without, our key to survival. As our dependence on learning grew, our own biology became less and less important. The embarrassing result was that humans became the only species to accidentally domesticate themselves, a dangerous and unnatural achievement.
With the emergence of agriculture and civilization, our mindset got much wackier, and we began causing significant ecological damage (while hunter-gatherers continued a low-impact way of life). In the civilized world, the notion of human superiority moved to center stage, and old fashioned ritual magic was replaced with powerful human-like gods and goddesses. The new mindset majored in individualism, competition, and aggression. The entire planet, and everything on it, was absorbed into the human sphere. This gave birth to the humanist ideology, which had now spread to almost every society on Earth.
As domesticated animals, we became excellent followers, obedient hard working servants. We could endure living in high density populations, and spending many hours a day in windowless factories manufacturing frivolous status trinkets. We had an extremely high tolerance for abuse. Alas, our days of wild freedom were behind us, and forgotten.
Some say that there is a window of opportunity, between the ages of 5 and 12, when we are most likely to form vital emotional bonds with nature. A bond with life on Earth is essential for a sane mind. Unfortunately, today’s kids are far more likely to stay indoors and form bonds with technology, which we eagerly encourage. They are dangerously isolated from the family of life, and likely to remain stunted for the rest of their days.
Livingston went on and on, illuminating the various errors of our ways. This was not a celebration the amazing brilliance of humankind (which sounds sillier every year). Instead, he presented us with a coherent explanation of how we got into this mess — a sobering look in the mirror.
The good news is that the core of the problem is thought patterns, and thought patterns can be changed. First, the notion of human superiority must be disemboweled and fed to the ravenous mongrels. It is essential that we once again develop an intimate and respectful relationship with nature. Remember that there was a time when this culture did not exist. We can live without it, and we must.
Many thinkers have come to the same conclusion, that we must radically change the way we think and live. Livingston’s analysis focused attention on domestication, bonding with nature, abandoning dominance relationships, and denouncing the diabolical cult of humanism. He followed a different path, and added some important pieces to the puzzle.
He concluded by prodding his readers: “We, the educated, the informed, the well nourished, the affluent, do pathetically little to stall the human juggernaut.” We need to imagine an alternative way of human being in the world, and we need to stop being silent, passive, tolerant, domesticated sheep. No matter how broken we are, we all still possess traces of undamaged healthy wildness buried deep inside — ancestral memories of better days. Courage!
July 8, 2014
If you're into the critique of civilization, or the idea that the human connection to nature has changed in a bad way, you have to read this. It's smarter, more surprising, and more challenging than Derrick Jensen or Daniel Quinn. Where they argue that humans were perfectly integrated with nature until the invention of agriculture, so that we could reconnect with merely a cultural change, Livingston puts the fall of man all the way back to the taming of fire! He argues that the first campfires, rather than protecting us from wild predators, announced our presence to them, and forced us to become so scary and powerful that they wouldn't come after us.
Livingston's great idea is the concept of prosthetic being. He argues that humans, far more than other animals, rely on culturally-transmitted technique: knowledge of how to do stuff that does not come from directly engaging other kinds of life, but from abstract mental models learned from other humans. This body of abstraction gives us power, but also separates and numbs us. And this is not just a product of civilization, but the way we've been living for more than a million years -- long enough to be built into our biology. He writes:
"Nowhere may the human presence be seen as fully integrated and 'natural,' because wherever we may be, or however long we may have been there, we are still domesticates. Domesticates have no ecologic place, and they show it consistently and universally. When non-European indigenous peoples received and began to use firearms, for example, they revealed their exotic placelessness without missing a beat."
Another radical idea in this book is that nature is not based on competition, and that wild animals do not have territories, but that those ideas are just projections of our human culture:
"Let us see the singing cardinal in the springtime as surrounded not by staked-out physical turf but rather (following Evernden) by a kind of invisible osmotic membrane encapsulating his temporarily extended being.... The bird himself has become a community of existences, and at the instant when he sings, the momentary (once only) event of that song is numinous.... The numen arises from the mutuality or the complementariness of the bird and his co-participants."
Livingston's great idea is the concept of prosthetic being. He argues that humans, far more than other animals, rely on culturally-transmitted technique: knowledge of how to do stuff that does not come from directly engaging other kinds of life, but from abstract mental models learned from other humans. This body of abstraction gives us power, but also separates and numbs us. And this is not just a product of civilization, but the way we've been living for more than a million years -- long enough to be built into our biology. He writes:
"Nowhere may the human presence be seen as fully integrated and 'natural,' because wherever we may be, or however long we may have been there, we are still domesticates. Domesticates have no ecologic place, and they show it consistently and universally. When non-European indigenous peoples received and began to use firearms, for example, they revealed their exotic placelessness without missing a beat."
Another radical idea in this book is that nature is not based on competition, and that wild animals do not have territories, but that those ideas are just projections of our human culture:
"Let us see the singing cardinal in the springtime as surrounded not by staked-out physical turf but rather (following Evernden) by a kind of invisible osmotic membrane encapsulating his temporarily extended being.... The bird himself has become a community of existences, and at the instant when he sings, the momentary (once only) event of that song is numinous.... The numen arises from the mutuality or the complementariness of the bird and his co-participants."
March 10, 2014
John A. Livingston is a great thinker; I definitely enjoyed his ethics-focused views in this book.
September 4, 2020
Livingston makes a rational case, showing that our collective cult of self-supremacy is at the root of our war against nature. He's passionate and states things clearly. I took notes. But he concludes that without complete eradication of supremism from our collective minds, all efforts to "save," "protect," or "conserve" nature are just part of the problem. With that, only the ongoing effort of mental rectification is of any avail. As a professor on the subject, he explains: "I carry within me a prosthetic implant, to be sure, but apart from that I am whole, and the prosthesis itself can be erased and reprogrammed. ... Since this is not a physical but an intellectual challenge, I shall simply have to think them away." I wish him luck, but suspect that doing practical things that nurture life can actually help with that.
April 16, 2024
This is one of those paradigm-shift philosophical books. The author explores homo sapiens as a species that domesticated itself. He explains that ideology is a system of related beliefs about the world and mediating our experiences within it. This has become our prosthesis that acts to separate ourselves from wilderness and wildness. Science and technology is merely the most successful ideology package, if success is defined as the ability to conquer and dominate not only Nature, but the minds of most domesticated humans.
The author discusses much more from a broad range of topics, to include anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion, mythology, psychology, sociology, politics, and so forth.
I first heard about Rogue Primate from anarchist blogger Ran Prieur. I also recommend the book and will definitely read it again.
The author discusses much more from a broad range of topics, to include anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion, mythology, psychology, sociology, politics, and so forth.
I first heard about Rogue Primate from anarchist blogger Ran Prieur. I also recommend the book and will definitely read it again.
January 7, 2024
not sure what discipline this falls under, sociology, anthropology, something else. a bit slow going for me but even so it's a provocative read, lots of information to absorb and ideas to ponder.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews