The second way she was correct is that it’s clearly possible to construct stories teaching us that rape is acceptable. The Bible certainly stands out as an example of this. Further, given that 25 percent of women in this culture are raped during their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have to fend off rape attempts,30 it seems pretty obvious that a lot of men have learned well the lessons that women are objects to be used, and that men have the right to do whatever violence they would like to women. These stories are told to us by people like, to choose just one egregious example among an entire culture’s worth, Brian De Palma, director of such films as Dressed to Kill, Carrie, and The Untouchables, who said, “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach—chopping up women, putting women in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?”31 Even more to the point, he also said that “using women in situations where they are killed or sexually attacked” is simply a “genre convention . . . like using violins when people look at each other.”32
Similarly, we can create a series of stories that cause us to believe it makes sense to deforest the planet, vacuum the oceans, impoverish the majority of humans. If the stories are good enough—effective enough at convincing us the stories are more important than physical reality—it will not only make sense to destroy the world, but we will feel good about it, and we will feel good about killing anyone who tries to stop us.
One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You’ve been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog-shit hot dogs, dog-shit ice cream, General Tso’s dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn’t taste that good.33 Or if you cling too tightly to these stories you’ve been told about eating dog shit (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make the example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. (Who was the genius who decided [for us] that it was a good idea to put poisons on our own food?). Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac™, Whopper™, or Coca Cola™. Physical reality eventually trumps narrative. It has to. It just can take a long time. In the case of civilization, it has so far taken some six thousand years (considerably less, of course, for its victims).
It took me a couple of years to articulate a response to my friend. One afternoon I called her up. We went to dinner.
She said, “Well?”
“Water,” I said.
“Water?”
“Water.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“It’s everything,” I responded.
She didn’t understand.
“Your basic point was that nothing is inherently good or bad . . .”
“Right.” She nodded.
“And that the stories we tell ourselves determine not only whether we perceive something as good or bad, but whether it in fact is . . .”
“Yes,” she said. “Because humans are the sole definers of value . . .”
We’d been through this before, and I’d been through this with so many other people, too. Once I had an office at a university next to that of a philosophy professor. I wandered in sometimes to chat, but was always quickly repulsed by his relentless strangeness and illogic. “Because humans are the sole definers of value, nothing in the world has any value unless we decide it does,” he said time and again, as though by repeating his starting assumption enough times he would force me to accept it, just as the possibility of failing his class forced his students to do the same. I fled the room each time in disarray, but I’ve always wished I would have returned with a hammer. He would have asked about it, and I would have replied, “If I hit your thumb, you won’t decide cognitively that getting hit by a hammer hurts. Not getting hit by a hammer has inherent value, no matter what you decide about it.”
Unfortunately, this form of narcissism—that only humans (and more specifically some very special humans, and even more specifically the disembodied thoughts of these very special humans) matter—is central to this culture. It pervades everything from this culture’s religion to its economics to its philosophy, literature, medicine, politics, and so on. And it certainly pervades our relationships with nonhuman members of the natural world. If it did not, we could not cause clearcuts nor construct dams. I once read a book on zoos and wildlife in which the authors asked why wildlife should be preserved, and then answered their own question in a way that makes this arrogance and stupidity especially clear: “Our answer is that the human world would be impoverished, for animals are preserved solely for human benefit, because human beings have decided they want them to exist for human pleasure. The notion that they are preserved for their sakes is a peculiar one, for it implies that animals might wish a certain condition to endure. It is, however, nonsensical for humans to imagine that animals might want to continue the existence of their species.”34
I told my friend this story.
“Were they serious, or ironic?” she asked.
“Dead fucking serious.”
She replied, “They’re full of shit. The arguments are unfounded.”
I raised my eyebrows.
She said, “I’m not so hard-core as I used to be.” She’d long-since dumped the philosopher, and started making sense again. “If the stories we live by are going to mean anything, they have to be grounded, anchored. We have to have a reference point we can rely on.”
I said, “I can name for you something that is good, no matter what stories we tell ourselves.”
“And it is . . .”
I held up my glass. “Drinkable quantities of clean water.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Drinkable quantities of clean water are unqualifiedly a good thing, no matter the stories we tell ourselves.”
She got it. She smiled before saying, “And breathable clean air.”
We both nodded.
She continued, “Without them you die.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Without them, everyone dies.”
Now she was excited. “That’s the anchor,” she said. “We can build an entire morality from there.”
It was my turn to get excited. “Exactly,” I said again.
We spent the rest of the evening sitting at the restaurant discussing—fleshing out—what an embodied morality would look like, feel like, be. If the foundation for my morality consists not of commandments from a God whose home is not primarily of this Earth and whose adherents have committed uncountable atrocities, nor of laws created by those in political power to serve those in political power, nor even the perceived wisdom—the common law—of a culture that has led us to ecological apocalypse, but if instead the foundation consists of the knowledge that I am an animal who requires habitat—including but not limited to clean water, clean air, non-toxic food—what does my consequent morality suggest about the rightness or wrongness of, say, pesticide production? If I understand that as human animals we require healthy landbases for not only physical but emotional health, how will I perceive the morality of mass extinction? How does the understanding that humans and salmon thrived here together in Tu’nes for at least twelve thousand years affect my perception of the morality of the existence of dams, deforestation, or anything else that destroys this long-term symbiosis by destroying salmon?
Although we both enjoyed our talk, we each knew we were leaving something unsaid. Not until we were outside the restaurant, returning to our respective cars, did either one of us mention it. She said, “I understand the immorality of poisoning our bodies and toxifying landbases, and of course I know that rape is immoral, but how does the fact that we have bodies, the fact that we have needs, the fact that we are animals, make rape immoral?”
I took a deep breath. The answer was right there. I could see it, taste it. I almos
t had it. I opened my mouth to say it. But then it was gone. I lost it, almost had it again, then lost it entirely. My mind was fried from all the thinking and talking.
“It’s late,” she said. “We’ll talk again soon.”
“Soon,” I said.35
CATASTROPHE
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, per- haps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.
Octavio Paz 36
IT IS CUSTOMARY WHEN WRITING TO HIDE ONE’S PRESUMPTIONS. The hope is that readers will flow along with the narrative and get swept up by the language until by the end they’ve reached roughly the same conclusions as the author, never realizing that oftentimes the unstated starting point was far more important to the conclusion than the arguments themselves. For example, you hear some talking head on television ask, “How are we going to best make the U.S. economy grow?” Premise one: We want the U.S. economy to grow. Premise two: We want the U.S. economy to exist. Premise three: Who the hell is we?
I’m going to try to not slide premises by you. I want to lay them out as clearly as I can, for you to accept or reject. Part of the reason I want to do this is that the questions I’m exploring regarding civilization are the most important questions we as a culture and as individuals have ever been forced to face. I don’t want to cheat. I want to convince neither you nor me unfairly (nor, for that matter, do I want to convince either of us at all), but instead to help us both better understand what to do (or not do) and how to do it (or why not). This goal will be best served by as much transparency—and honesty—as I can muster.
Some of the assertions undergirding this book are self-evident, some I’ve shown elsewhere, some I will support here. Of course I cannot list every one of my premises, since many of them are hidden even from me, or far more fundamentally are inherent in English, or the written word (books, for example, presume a beginning, middle, and end). Nonetheless, I’ll try my best.
The first premise I want to mention is so obvious I’m embarrassed to have to write it down, as silly in its way as having to state that clean air or clean water are good and necessary, and as self-evident as the polluted air we breathe and water we drink. But our capacity and propensity for self-delusion—indeed the necessity of self-delusion if we’re to continue to propagate this culture—means I need to be explicit. The first premise is: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.
Years ago I was riding in a car with friend and fellow activist George Draffan. He has influenced my thinking as much as any other one person. It was a hot day in Spokane. Traffic was slow. A long line waited at a stoplight. I asked, “If you could live at any level of technology, what would it be?”
As well as being a friend and an activist, George can be a curmudgeon. He was in one of those moods. He said, “That’s a stupid question. We can fantasize about living however we want, but the only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age. What we have now is the merest blip—we’re one of only six or seven generations who ever have to hear the awful sound of internal combustion engines (especially two-cycle)—and in time we’ll return to the way humans have lived for most of their existence. Within a few hundred years at most. The only question will be what’s left of the world when we get there.”
He’s right, of course. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable: in fact it probably takes anyone but a rocket scientist to figure this one out. The hope of those who wish to perpetuate this culture is something called “resource substitution,” whereby as one resource is depleted another is substituted for it (I suppose there is at least one hope more prevalent than this, which is that if we ignore the consequences of these actions they will not exist). Of course on a finite planet this merely puts off the inevitable, ignores the damage caused in the meantime, and begs the question of what will be left of life when the last substitution has been made. Question: When oil runs out, what resource will be substituted in order to keep the industrial economy running? Unstated premises: a) equally effective substitutes exist; b) we want to keep the industrial economy running; and c) keeping it running is worth more to us (or rather to those who make the decisions) than the human and nonhuman lives destroyed by the extraction, processing, and utilization of this resource.
Similarly, any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable: if fewer salmon return each year than the year before, sooner or later none will return. If fewer ancient forests stand each year than the year before, sooner or later none will stand. Once again, the substitution of other resources for depleted ones will, some say, save civilization for another day. But at most this merely holds off the inevitable while it further damages the planet. This is what we see, for example, in the collapse of fishery after fishery worldwide: having long-since fished out the more economically valuable fish, now even so-called trash fish are being extirpated, disappearing into civilization’s literally insatiable maw.
Another way to put all of this is that any group of beings (human or nonhuman, plant or animal) who take more from their surroundings than they give back will, obviously, deplete their surroundings, after which they will either have to move, or their population will crash (which, by the way, is a one sentence disproof of the notion that competition drives natural selection: if you hyperexploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take. Duh). This culture—Western Civilization—has been depleting its surroundings for six thousand years, beginning in the Middle East and expanding now to deplete the entire planet. Why else do you think this culture has to continually expand? And why else, coincident with this, do you think it has developed a rhetoric—a series of stories that teach us how to live—making plain not only the necessity but desirability and even morality of continual expansion—causing us to boldly go where no man has gone before—as a premise so fundamental as to become invisible? Cities, the defining feature of civilization, have always relied on taking resources from the surrounding countryside, meaning, first, that no city has ever been or ever will be sustainable on its own, and second, that in order to continue their ceaseless expansion cities must ceaselessly expand the areas they must ceaselessly hyperexploit. I’m sure you can see the problems this presents and the end point it must reach on a finite planet. If you cannot or will not see these problems, then I wish you the best of luck in your career in politics or business. Our collective studied-to-the-point-of-obsessive avoidance of acknowledging and acting on the surety of this end point is, especially given the consequences, more than passing strange.
Yet another way to say that this way of living is unsustainable is to point out that because ultimately the only real source of energy for the planet is the sun (the energy locked in oil, for example, having come from the sun long ago; and I’m excluding nuclear power from consideration here because only a fool would intentionally fabricate and/or refine materials that are deadly poisonous for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, especially to serve the frivolous, banal, and anti-life uses to which electricity is put: think retractable stadium roofs, supercolliders, and aluminum beer cans), any way of being that uses more energy than that currently coming from the sun will not last, because the non-current energy—stored in oil that could be burned, stored in trees that could be burned (stored, for that matter, in human bodies that could be burned)—will in time be used up. As we see.
I am more or less constantly amazed at the number of intelligent and well-meaning people who consistently conjure up magical means to maintain this current disconnected way of living. Just
last night I received an email from a very smart woman who wrote, “I don’t think we can go backward. I don’t think Hunter/Gatherer is going to be it. But is it possible to go forward in a way that will bring us around the circle back to sustainability?”
It’s a measure of the dysfunction of civilization that no longer do very many people of integrity believe we can or should go forward with it because it serves us well, but rather the most common argument in its favor (and this is true also for many of its particular manifestations, such as the global economy and high technology) seems to be that we’re stuck with it, so we may as well make the best of a very bad situation. “We’re here,” the argument goes, “We’ve lost sustainability and sanity, so now we have no choice but to continue on this self- and other-destructive path.” It’s as though we’ve already boarded the train to Treblinka, so we might as well stay on for the ride. Perhaps by chance or by choice (someone else’s) we’ll somehow end up somewhere besides the gas chambers.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 4
