01042021

 The black wolf...

All black wolves in the world today -- in Europe, North America, Asia -- descend from an early domesticated dog that decided to leave its new human companions and rejoin wild wolves.

"The feral" exists in a peculiar relationship with the civilized and the domesticated. Unlike men, wolves do not moralize civilization: human companionship and the demands with come with it are either a benefit or they're not. One conforms to what is civil, or what is domesticated, because it's still more secure than the cruelty of nature.

Until it isn't. Unlike the wolf, the dog is expendable. So too is the sheep. One can imagine that in a hard year, the shepherd is actually more dangerous to the sheep than the wolf.

Men are inherently social, but society is incapable of being a moral agent. This might sound strange in our own lips: we ordinarily conceive of civilization as a moral landscape, or so the various culture warriors would have us believe, whether it's Cicero or Jordan Peterson. But civilization is not a moral agent. It is no more capable of morality than the tides of the ocean. Civilization deserves respect in the same sense that a grizzly bear does: ignore it at your peril, benefit from it where you can, but don't think for a moment that it can care about you. Only people can do that.

"But civilization is made of people. That's all it is."

Yes -- but caring is a relationship, whereas civilization is the opposite of a relationship. The entire point of civilization is being able to know how to interact with strangers according to a set of abstract rules. That is its only function. It opens many doors: trade, travel, wage labor, communication. It also opens other doors: tyranny, empire, organized warfare, genocide.

The technology of civilization is one of replacing direct human relationships with institutions, laws, belief systems, and so on -- not because they are better, but because they are scalable.

"But can't people care about each other using laws and institutions?"

They can certainly try. The point is that sometimes it's better to be the dog, other times the wolf.