WHEN WE ARE HUMAN

These are dark and darkening times, and the chronic illness of the planet calls for radically new thinking if there is to be any hope of renewal. When We Are Human offers thought at a necessary and primal level.

John Zerzan is a prominent and respected anarcho-primitivist author well known for his argument that civilization, technology and specialized labor are at the root of society's propensity toward environmental destruction. In When We Are Human, he is back with his call to action to survive and thrive, overcoming our modern crisis. Instead of viewing the decline of modern civilization as something to mourn, he sees the opportunity for us to reclaim our true humanity.

All previous civilizations have failed, and now there's just one global civilization, which is starkly, grandly failing. To deny or avoid this fact is to remain in the sphere of the superficial, the irrelevant. The physical environment is reaching the catastrophe stage as the seas warm, rise, acidify, and fill with plastics. Icebergs ahead and floating past beachgoers idly watching the planet die.

So much is failing, so much is interrelated in the technosphere of ever-greater dependence and estrangement. Social existence, now strangely isolated, is beset by mass shootings, rising suicide rates, slipping longevity, loneliness, anxiety, and the maddening stream of lies and concocted politics.

Zerzan trains his passionate focus on several fields of discourse: anthropology, history, philosophy, technology, psychology, and the spiritual. Points of light that become a kaleidoscope refracting new insights and contributing an overall picture of late civilization. More than in his previous works, Zerzan, as an elder in his community, shows us our past errors to ensure a more meaningful future for our next iteration of humanity.

John Zerzan is a philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. His earlier books include these Feral House titles: Running on Emptiness, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, Twilight of the Machines, Future Primitive Revisited, Why Hope?: The Stand Against Civilization, and A People's History of Civilization.