While technology has changed beyond all recognition in the past 300 years, our human brains are similar to what they were 100,000 years ago. At our core, we are ultimately hunter gatherers with sufficiently adaptable behaviour to be capable of living in circumstances that differ greatly from those we evolved in.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions were, broadly speaking, a grand bargain where we sacrificed our primal aesthetic, behavioural and environmental preferences to produce the materials goods we require for sustenance with greater efficiency and in greater quantity. One can detect intense nostalgia for a primeval hunter gatherer lifestyle in many of the myths that are told by agrarian societies, Adam and Eve and the garden of eden, in the case of the Israelites, while the Greeks hark back to a Golden Age when people did not have to work as the Earth provided them with abundant food.
As technology becomes ever more advanced, and it becomes easier to produce all that we require, we may no longer need to sacrifice our primeval aesthetic on the altar of economic productivity. It may become possible to have both simultaneously – to live in an environment resembling our primeval past while producing all the food, modern comforts and conveniences (such as communication and transportation) that we enjoy today.
Ironically, extreme technological progress may well result in aesthetic regression. By using swarms of agricultural robots, controlled by AI, to create intense abundance with a primeval aesthetic, we could usher in a new golden age, an age where everyday life resembles the idyllic scenes depicted in mythical paintings.
A central pillar of Socibuild’s atavistic aesthetic is the belief that abundant food growing in the soil has a psychologically uplifting effect; one that exceeds the psychological boost produced by food stacked on supermarket shelves. Furthermore, the primeval diversity of colourful fruits growing in the soil uplifts the soul to a greater degree than agrarian monoculture. I have experienced this uplifting sensation first hand during my stay in Brazier Parks, or The Green Backyard in Peterborough, as I walked through the gardens overflowing with fruits and edible vegetables I realised that permaculture is not just a technique for producing food sustainably in a manner that takes care of the soil with less pesticide and water use – it is also a technique for producing an aesthetic of primeval abundance. It produces the conditions that would have made our hunter-gatherer ancestors celebrate in ancient times and – since we are, for the most part, unchanged since then – cause us to celebrate today.
In addition to all the concrete and automobiles, our modern social lives in anonymous crowded cities would be unrecognisable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In addition to permaculture, Socibuild will strive to model the societies that live on its land to more closely resemble the ancient societies we originally evolved in while ensuring they remain peaceful and economically productive.
Ofcourse, not everything in our remote past was pleasant. Our ancestors experienced famine as well as feasts, feuding as well as friendship, comraderee and play. Any sensible renaissance attempts to extract the good from the past while leaving the bad behind. The core philosophy of Socibuild is not to reproduce everything from our past, but rather to use our evolutionary past to inspire the aesthetic of our communities, to consider, specifically, the social and environmental conditions that would have caused our ancestors to celebrate and leap for joy and to reproduce those same conditions in a modern context in the hope that we can arouse a similar emotional response and accompanying psychological benefit.