carbon limited

In the Dorset woods last summer, I spent a day learning to make fire with a bow drill, starting with just a knife and a log. There were eight of us on this bushcraft course, each one tasked with making his own fire from scratch. We all worked in a charged silence and then eventually someone would get a fire going and he’d howl and hoot and punch the air. The others would look up enviously for a moment and then bend back down to their own bow drills.

In the evening around the campfire we talked about the lesson and some of the guys agreed that making fire was more satisfying that most things they’d accomplished in their professional lives. Fire is the foundation of civilisation – you could argue that fire defines humanity. We’re human, we’re more or less civilised, so making fire should be easy. But it isn’t – because it’s too simple.

By its nature, a complex society requires specialists. Most of us in Europe and the US have jobs that fill a tiny niche, jobs that would be useless in a simpler society; meanwhile our needs stay the same regardless of the complexity of the society we live in. Because of our specialisation, we often lack even the basic generalist skills that are needed to satisfy those needs. Instead, we specialists are reliant on other specialists (themselves reliant and yet other specialists), each of us operating many layers of abstraction away from the processes by which our needs are met. Continue Reading »