Right now, America is being “decivilized.” It’s descending into old kinds of social barbarism, and engaging in new forms of cultural savagery. For most people, it’s a much less pleasant place to live than it was just a decade ago.
The good news is, it can be “recivilized.” As our current way of life becomes increasingly dysfunctional, we’ll have an opportunity to create a new one that suits us much better.
What should this new way of life look like? Recivilized exists to answer that question.
We’re all hunter-gatherers at heart.
This site is informed by a crucial truth, one that’s been hidden in plain sight since the dawn of civilization: in our hearts and minds, we’re all still hunter-gatherers.
For a million years, we humans lived and worked in small, nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. That’s the life we evolved to live, and we’re still hard-wired to live it. We may have central air and smartphones now, but we’re still hunter-gatherers at heart.
We can’t go back to a Stone Age way of life, and even if we could, we might not want to. There’s a lot to be said for civilization. All the same, if we want to create a civilized way of life that works for us, we must take our ancient nature into account.
We humans are socially creative.
Previous efforts to improve society have been informed only by the past 5000 years of human history. That is, civilization. Now, recent scholarship in anthropology reveals how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived during the past 50,000 years.
Books such as The Dawn of Everything and Tribe deepen our understanding of ourselves by describing the wide variety of Stone Age social arrangements. Some pre-agricultural societies were surprisingly sophisticated, and several featured ways of life that we modern folk would find congenial.
We can create a better way of life.
We know how we evolved to live. We know that we are socially creative. We also know, from the work of historians such as Polybius and Oswald Spengler, what makes civilized societies succeed, and why ours is failing now.
We can now use this knowledge to create a new way of life that really suits us. That is, one that combines the advantages of civilization with the human-scale organization that enables us to thrive. Recivilized exists to help bring that about.
