Zardoz, Critical Aquarians and Degrowth Utopias

What happened to the ecological utopian visions and visionaries that came out of the counterculture of the fifties, sixties, and seventies? Prior to the role reversal of hippies into yuppies, of the back to the land dreams transformed into jobs at a bank, a life in suburbia, and 2.5 kids, there had been an Aquarian counterculture. Those Aquarians carried a strain of thought critical of technology, unafraid of our biology, inspired by ecology, and considered alternate economies and the prospects for degrowth as a way to shift culture. This nascent tradition aimed to put the brakes on the endless expansion of the industrial system represented by all things Establishment, man. If endless growth can be thought of as a synonym for cancer, then the push for progress at all costs is metastasis. These Aquarians sought another way.

Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, looks at these neglected Aquarian visionaries in an effort to rattle the hypermodernist cages and the addled worldview promulgated by the transhumanist inmates of Silicon Valley.

​To do this Galluzzo uses the schlocky yet profound seventies scifi film Zardoz as his lens. That makes his sumptuous word feast all the more delectable. The seventies produced some of the best scifi films of all time. Many of my own favorites are from that era and most of them had messages worthy of heeding. Soylent Green, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison showcased one possibility of the effects of global warming. Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 was a fever vision of a United States government converted into a totalitarian regime and reality show. To hide all the civil unrest caused by economic ruin they created a reality TV show (nothing prescient there, cough, cough) with drivers engaged in blood sport careening and crashing into eachother on a coast to coast kill spree that probably made even made J.G. Ballard blush. Writer and director Michael Chrichton brought Coma to the screen, based on the novel by Robin Cook. It centered on an organ harvesting conspiracy within the medical industrial complex. The film Silent Running showed what could happen to our forests and trees if we continue to give way to purely extractive economies. Zardoz fits in well with these and other films from the decade. For those who have yet to see this one, you may know it best by the reputation it has garnered form lead actor Sean Connery’s loin and groin costume, best described as a big red diaper.

Zardoz was written, produced and directed by John Boorman, the same guy who gave us Deliverance, Excalibur, and The Emerald Forest, among other iconic films. It takes place in the year 2293 and the world is as divided as ever. This time the divisions fall between the impotent but supposedly enlightened “Eternals” and those who don’t know how to read but know how to fight and get it on, called the “Brutals.” To keep the savages from killing everyone, a strange giant stone head floats around and commands a group of people known as exterminators to kill these other killers. Sean Connery’s character is one of these exterminators. In the process of learning that the stone headed god is not a god, but a kind of spaceship operated by a man a behind the curtain, a kind wizard of oz, the exterminator bucks the system and penetrates the “Vortex,” a world of scantily clad mystical midriffs where the Eternals dwell. The story touches on themes of eugenics, hierarchical population control, AI, and the degradation of the natural world.

The Brutals have to live in an irradiated industrial wasteland and grow food for the Eternals whose existence, though without meaning, is full of luxury. It sounds rather like the rightward end of the accelerationism, and neocameralist visions of corporate sovereignty, i.e., the feudalist tech-corp company town model embraced by Elon Musk and his Starbase. Consider this just another way that artists are capable of predicting aspects of our futures. Other possible real-world Vortexes now underway include the giant neighborhood Google is planning around its HQ in Mountain View, California or the “Zucktown” Meta is creating in Menlo Park. You can’t expect tech executives and their cohorts to be bothered with anything as essential to actual life as farming. That’s too biological. Too flesh oriented. Too dirty. 

Then Zed came along, a non-computable black swan event that brought chaos to rigidly calcified order. 

            Galluzzo’s reading of the film is “as another sort of ‘social science fiction,’ one that is also archaeological, as I excavate a broader post-Sixties movement and current of thought— decelerationist, neo-Luddite, and counter-modernist—of which Zardoz was a part. This constellation was an important forerunner of degrowth, among other contemporary movements, that see in a certain developmentalist imperative that defines the modernization process the root of our current social, ecological, and existential crises… [that] challenges us to think utopia and limits together in a way that is inexplicable to those ‘Star Trek socialists’ who cannot distinguish freedom and flourishing from Faustian final frontiers; in fact, Zardoz is very much a Swiftian riposte to Star Trek and the Promethean fever dreams of postwar science fiction. It is only after the ‘future’ and among the ruins that we will build our necessarily imperfect utopias.”

            Much of this tradition that was concerned with slowing down the pace of supposed progress has now been buried or put away into a cobwebbed corner of the counterculture. The environmental movement, for all its gains, has just as often been co-opted when it would been better if it had continued to be co-oped, held within a collective and cooperative framework on the fringes of the corporate system. Greenwashers have long since replaced green grocers. Key voices whose work would resonate together across an interconnected landscape have been sidelined as Promethean techno-utopias and the emissaries of transhumanism have gained ascendance. To look at one of the ways that played out, let’s take a brief detour into the world of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog, which Galluzzo also touches on.

The rejection of the ethos encapsulated by the Whole Earth Catalog and it’s “access to tools” around ecology, self-reliance, the DIY ethic, appropriate technology and alternative education can be seen in the way Stewart Brand, its publisher, increasingly came to see computers as a means for liberation. In the process the ecological vision that the catalog originally championed was downplayed in favor of cybernetic connection. This is understandable given how big a fan of systems thinking Brand was, of how hard he worked at getting the work of people like Gregory Bateson, with his work on cybernetics and ecology, into the hands of a wider audience.
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             The last issues of the catalog that truly adhered to the vision came out in 1974. Other issues followed, but many of these, like the 1977 issue, dealt with such fantasies as space colonies, or tellingly in 1984, the Whole Earth Software Review. Fear of Big Brother gave way to love of Big Brother. The eventual McGovCorp ownership of the cybermedia should come as no surprise given that it was built on technology engineered by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A modernist and post-modernist vision of futurism dominated the former Aquarian milieu as the early Whole Earth Catalog was discarded in favor of a World Wide Web. Computers have excelled as information exchange systems, yet they have now reached a point where they have become our own mind forged media manacles. As that web proliferated, dreams of free communication and information exchange were trampled over by platform after platform during the internet’s wild west years, and its promise cashed in for filthy lucre, and filthy lucre traded in for technocratic control. 

​Brand may have given up on back to the land communes in favor of space colonies, as he became an advocate of, but his wasn’t the only game in town with regards to the ethos around appropriate technology. Many others in the sixties and seventies were writing about how to get by while leaving a smaller footprint on the planet, and how to flourish while doing so. Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia came out in 1975 and it gave popular voice to a number of the ideas being exchanged within the milieu. Other writers such as Christopher Alexander and Paolo Soleri looked at the way the built environment could be refashioned in favor of human life instead of factories and machines. Others such as the New Alchemy Institute looked at ways to redesign our support systems of food, water and shelter, and in the process created amazing bioshelters, aquacultures and other innovations, that if followed, could have alchemized our way of living. Other investigators, such as those at the Farallones Institute, pursued research into “integral urban living.” There were myriad others who pursued some form of organic gardening, food co-ops, alternative education systems, and related subjects in a search for new ways of living as traditional had been lost to industrialization. With the energy crisis of the time unfolding around them, and books like the Limits to Growth in heavy circulation, there was an awareness that the orgy of energy given by access to cheap fossil fuels couldn’t last forever.

The writers around appropriate tech weren’t the only architects looking to build “degrowth utopias.” There was a group of thinkers, connected not so much by shared ideologies as by conceptual resonance that are who Galluzzo calls “Critical Aquarians.” That he brings these thinkers together under a shared moniker was one of my favorite things about his book, as they really do fit together, and their work is important for regenerating this rich vein of thought.

            Who are these Critical Aquarians? Some include James Lovelock, known for his Gaia hypothesis. Others are Ursula K. Leguin for her writings on the possibility of anarchist societies in novels like the Dispossesed or the ecological questions posed in her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Other people he gives the Critical Aquarian moniker to are thinkers like Norman O. Brown who looked at the way eroticism and civilization have been at odds with each other, and reclaimed some of the bodycentric mysticism of Jacob Boheme and William Blake.

Galluzzo also puts Ivan Illich in the Critical Aquarian camp. At a time when the institutions of education are being attacked and questioned by federal institutions, educators might do well to look again at works by Illich such as his book Deschooling Society, where he writes, “The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Illich’s work Tools of Conviviality where he explores these kinds of webs gives readers a real sense of the ways everyday people can create their own tools to bypass the structures imposed by the technocratic elite.

 In delineating and beginning to assemble those who fit into the Critical Aquarians, Galluzzo gives us a way to trace the theoretical underpinning that can work to compliment the visionaries of the appropriate tech movement. That he manages to do this using what some might consider lowbrow material makes it all the more interesting. But, just in case you were wondering, the use of Zardoz is not a fetishitic “retromania” by any means. In fact, one of the other reasons I fell under the spell of this book, is because it is a useful foil for some of the arguments made by the late influential theorist Mark Fisher and the ideas he put forth in his book Capitalist Realism and other writings. Fisher’s mourning of a lost modernist futurism always rather irritated me, even as I nodded along in agreement with many of his ideas. Indeed, Galluzzo writes, “under labels such as ‘left accelerationism’ and ‘fully automated luxury communism,’ we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist ‘lost futures’ of the twentieth century, to invoke cultural critic Mark Fisher, that supposedly offer us the lineaments of a better world.” In a critical endnote Galluzzo remarks, “the ‘lost futures’ in Zardoz and so many of the other, comparable works from the time, are interrogations, and often outright rejections of the modernist futurism Fisher mourns, even as these works outline alternatives outside Promethean techno-utopianism, capitalist and socialist alike.”

            For those of us who desire something other than fully automated luxury capitalism or communism, Galluzzo’s text offers key theoretical pointers. One of the many points that he and the Critical Aquarians elucidate upon is an acceptance of death. This would be a stark rejection of the transhumanist visions of escaping our own biology. Instead, it is an embrace of biology, and with it an embrace of limits. Death is the ultimate limit. Instead of viewing that as something that needs to be transcended or a problem to be solved, death can instead be used as a way to make all of life much more precious. This is something Galluzzo gets into in the last part of his little book, and something I hope to hear him write about further in the future.

            If you are lucky enough to have a VCR that hasn’t died, cuddling up a copy of this text and watching Zardoz is the perfect decelerationist remedy for slowing down and tapping into other ideas about what our futures might be.

​Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo was published in 2023 by Zer0 Books.

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