Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto by Paul Kingsnorth

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto Reviews

• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  A group of people are meeting on my university campus to discuss an area they are calling Political Geographies. I learned one of the things they are reading is this manifesto, the main authors of which are Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, from England. It's short, a slim volume, though you can also read it online, right here, and then connect to their website and related issues.
  
  
  http://dark-mountain.net/about/manife...
  
  I got it and read it right away. Context: I am an older reader of eco-terrorism, of radical approaches to the destruction of the planet. I think Duncan the Wonderdog, Show One by Duncan Hines, told in part from the perspective of animals, of nature, an ecoterrorist tale, is one of the greatest graphic novels ever made. I just read After the Ice, about the final loss of the ice in the Arctic Circle.
  
  Uncivilisation is about ecocide, the destruction of the planet that is going on even when I watch the Super Bowl (which I did and enjoyed!), and so on, as we go on with our daily lives, trying not to think of it. It is a statement of screaming rage, at first, and then an embrace of creativity, of storytelling, not as a means to reclaim where we were in some kind of enlightenment fantasy of progress, but as a guide to whatever is ahead for UN-civilisation after all there system collapses.
  
  The manifesto quotes heavily from the poet Robinson Jeffers, who was too dark for the US of A to embrace when he said many of these same things:
  
  These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
  Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
  For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
  To admire the tragic beauty they build.
  It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
  Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
  Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
  The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
  Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
  I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
  To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
  Man is not in the persons but in the
  Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
  Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
  
  Robinson Jeffers, 1935
  
  Here's a summary to see if you want to read the while thing, the manifesto's central principles, a summary:
  
  THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION
  
  ‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
  As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’
  
  1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
  
  2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
  
  3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
  
  4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
  
  5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
  
  6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
  
  7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
  
  8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
  
  Highly recommend!!! Read and let's talk! This came out in 2009! Where was I?
• 
  Alex Sarll

  Was there ever a trickier art form to pull off than the manifesto? If you're lucky, a few phrases will become the cliches of three generations hence. Read as a whole, though...invariably, your first readers will be the people who've already bought what you're selling, while the masses who need it are not the sort to read a manifesto. And you can't strike the necessary bold pose if you hedge every statement with caveats - but if you don't, inevitably you leave holes in the argument at which even the broadly sympathetic might find themselves poking in frustration. And make no mistake: I am in sympathy with much of this. That an increasingly deranged economy and the idea of 'growth' are largely responsible for the dire state of the planet I quite accept. But then, I live in North London and online, so I would, wouldn't I? That we're not going to be able to carry on regardless, sure. That more technology is not the answer...well, here I begin to dissent, because I suspect it's at least some of the likelier constellation of answers.
  
  And yet.
  
  The big idea of 'Uncivilisation' is attacking "the myth of human centrality". Some of the foundation suggested for this myth is questionable: "The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it". Really? Because last I checked, we have a word for 'humanity' too. And beyond that, all these grand, conflicted statements about our uniquely fucked-up role in the history of nature, how we are the only species to be capable of the current ecocide...that's just the myth of human centrality all over again. Self-disgust is self-obsession, honey: millions of years back, the algae killed most of the life then extant, and did vastly disruptive things to Earth's atmosphere that we half-bright apes are nowhere near matching.
  
  This sort of thing recurs; the sense of oneself as a far grander sinner than is in fact the case is matched by its flipside, the belief that one is a far bolder and lonelier rebel than the facts support. Some of the most powerful writing in the manifesto resides in quotes from the 1930s work of poet Robinson Jeffers, presented as a visionary exile from the canon. Well, up to a point, but when this came out Jeffers was already being bigged up in the bestselling books of Rob Macfarlane. Apparently "It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king"; I imagine Seth Rogen and Salman Rushdie both find it quite easy to imagine, and that's limiting it to creators with the initials SR. And like clockwork, along comes the familiar broadsheet moan, asking where the art can be found which addresses the issues of the day. Just like every other time, I read the question, sigh, and respond: you want art asking big, science-based questions about the future, and yet you still somehow didn't think to investigate science fiction, which has been handling this stuff since long before the muggles started paying attention?
  
  There's a persistent sense of a movement at pains to differentiate itself from nature writing; I suspect this is like the way Soft Cell saw themselves, for valid reasons, as entirely opposite to bands like Visage, yet from any kind of distance are invariably placed under the same umbrella. It's never clear in what, beyond an especially black take on the dark mood often and understandably present in nature writing, this difference consists. Equally, in the call for a new literature which abjures the old assumptions of progress ("The last taboo is the myth of civilisation"), I fail to see anything especially distinct from Celine or Cioran in hiking boots.
  
  There is a lot here that I like. Some passages are utterly true and necessary: "We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality." Much of the rest, even where I don't altogether agree, is still powerful writing and evidence that these people are broadly fighting the right corner. Fundamentally, I suspect it may be as simple as this: there will always rise would-be prophets, who have grand and sweeping visions for solutions to the issues of their age. And alongside them there will always be the pernickety bastards like me, the non-joiners, asking if they're sure they've really checked this paragraph against the implications of that chapter, and what about over here, and this bit? Are you *sure*?
  And without either one of those specialties, everything would likely have gone even more horribly wrong for humanity a lot sooner.
  I'll let the manifesto have the last word:
  "Beyond that… all is currently hidden from view. It is a long way across the plains, and things become obscured by distance. There are great white spaces on this map still. The civilised would fill them in; we are not so sure we want to. But we cannot resist exploring them, navigating by rumours and by the stars. We don’t know quite what we will find. We are slightly nervous. But we will not turn back, for we believe that something enormous may be out there, waiting to meet us."
  
• 
  Ted

  I "have" the book via the link given in David's review.
• 
  Ashley

  Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto is a plea for a conscious re-rendering of the world through stories, the primacy of which almost nobody acknowledges. Or realizes. The thesis runs that our modes and habits are products of stories we tell ourselves, and of course, this is clearly true. We buy green products because we experience guilt over burgeoning ecological woes. We shop locally if we can, for who wants kiwifruit in January if it has to be carried many thousands of miles? We vote. Kingsnorth and Hine submit that it would be in our interest to examine more carefully all the stories that make up our life, and where necessary, discard them in favor of better, wiser, more purposeful ones.
• 
  Shannon Finck

  "We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be."
• 
  Larry

  This is not really a book. It's very short.
  
  Defies easy categorization. It touches on politics. It touches on what you might call religion or spiritual things. There's a fairly strong current of environmental concern. I thought of
  Koyaanisqatsi. I thought of
  That Hideous Strength.
  
  Civilization as we know it is coming to an end. The myth of limitless progress and the perfectability of man is shattered. What is the story we should be telling about where we are now and where we are headed?
  
  You can find this online for free at
  https://dark-mountain.net/about/manif....
• 
  Jessica DeWitt

  This pamphlet started to pop up in many of my bookshelf recommendations, so I ordered it from the UK because it wasn't available on Amazon or from my local library.
  
  As someone who is familiar with a broad cross-section of environmental literature, the ideas put forward in this manifesto were not that shocking or groundbreaking, and the authors seem to be rather west-centric. But the idea behind the movement is interesting, and I would be willing to delve further into Dark Mountain literature.
• 
  John Wright

  The Dark Mountain Project (a website, a print journal, a movement) led me to this manifest. I did not write it, but it speaks to me as though I did. This is the manifesto for those of us who have stopped believing in the myth of "progress". This is for those of us who want to sit outside the bubble of civilization and comment upon what we see happening there.
• 
  Jack Clare

  I decided to read this after learning that Paul Kingsnorth was received into the Orthodox Church this year. While this book uncritically accepts evolutionary theory, it makes an interesting critique of modernity. Though it is about the environment, it is not a mere environmentalism - it is really the articulation of a kind of traditionalism. No wonder he became Orthodox.
• 
  Emma Filtness

  A beautifully-written, resonant manifesto. An important call to writers for Uncivilised writing to counter the myth of civilisation and human centrality. Truly inspiring.
• 
  Samuel Peck

  Don't agree with everything, but certainly thought-provoking.
• 
  Withmanyroots

  I am 10 years late to this party - but I found the narrative and guidelines I have been looking for.
• 
  Moon Captain

  yeah!
• 
  Christopher Cockrum

  Some good points. Some... meh. However, if the author was a true believer, shouldn't I have not heard of this?
• 
  Anna

  Reseña:
  http://theamericanbeat.wordpress.com/...
  
  Aunque la idea me parece genial y lo empecé a leer porque estoy muy interesada en estos temas, me ha parecido bastante vacío de contenidos con demasiados florituras.
• 
  Iryna

  Quite an interesting concept. Even if you don't fully agree- it makes you think and that, alone, is a great accomplishment. Definitively worth a read through.
  
• 
  Brendan M.

  I was a big, big fan of this slim volume.
• 
  Amy

  Paul Kingsnorth is essential reading for the Anthropocene.
• 
  Leif

  Manifestos are noisy things. This one is competing with the furor of modern life, resisting transformation. Read it.