I think the exhausted soil metaphor works for individuals, too: they don’t generally change until they’ve exhausted the possibilities of their previous way of being.
Last year I received an email from a woman who said that my work had saved her life. She had many times tried to kill herself, and was contemplating suicide again when she came across a passage in my work describing part of the reason this culture’s death urge manifests the way it does, in the widespread killing of humans and nonhumans, and in the killing of the planet. This death urge is partly a simple desire to die to this way of living that does not serve us well, but because we in this culture have forgotten that the spiritual exists, and have devalued the metaphorical, we do not understand that this death does not have to be physical, but could be transformative. Dying to one way of being so you can be reborn transformed is the oldest metaphor in the world, one the world is built on. But we forget, and so we build daisy-cutters and depleted-uranium shells, and we kill without ceasing. The woman said her own death urge might not have to manifest in the taking of her own life. Maybe she just wanted to transform. We corresponded a bit, she asked if we could take a walk when she was passing through town, and I agreed. It was a good walk, through meadows of thick sharp-edged grasses perfect for ground-nesting birds, into a sandy-soiled scrub pine forest near the ocean, and along the ocean beaches themselves. She was a good woman, smart, dedicated, knowledgeable about wild things. She was also in agony. Her agony derived partly from the aftereffects of the horrendous violence her father visited upon her as a child, and partly from her sensitivity to the similarly horrendous violence our culture perpetrates on the natural world. She said that instead of killing herself, she was going to spend three months alone in the desert, talking and listening to coyotes, clouds, ravens, rabbitbrush, and a cool, clear river. She hoped to return a new person.
She wrote me briefly when she returned, and then again a couple of months ago. She seemed to be doing well.
And then yesterday I received the letter. Evidently other people got the letter, too. It began, “Dear Friend, By the time you read this I will have done something that will come as no surprise to many of you. I will have committed suicide.” The letter went on to describe her attempts to overcome her pain, and ended with her arrangements for what should come after her death. She expressed regret that the law would not allow her to become food for wild animals.
After I got over my shock and had begun to move through my sorrow over the death of a good person I did not really know, I began to feel a stirring that within a few hours became the understanding that people usually don’t change. She may have thought she changed when she read my work, but she didn’t. She continued to daily ask the question of whether she should live or die until finally the answer came up die.
I know that I, too, carry scars both physical and emotional from my childhood that will never be healed. I know also that I will ask the same questions when I am old as when I was young. And I have to ask (the genesis of my question in no way negating its current relevance or importance): how much did my early experience of my father’s violence lead me to ask the question I’m asking now, about when is counterviolence an appropriate response to the violence of a dominator?120 Similarly, my mother is the same person she was twenty years ago, only wiser, and more tired. Most of my students at the prison love drugs—or at this point love writing about them—as much as they ever did. Often I only have to mention blunt, dub, heroin, crack, crank, and they’ll reminisce and laugh as those possessed. And even though they hate being imprisoned with an intensity I’ve rarely seen matched, and even though in many cases it was drugs that got them there, when I ask if they will use again when they get out (or for the lifers, would and if), most say yes. Statistics on addicts remaining sober (much less free of craving) are fairly dismal, and run from a low of ten to a high of 40 percent, with one writer commenting, “Chronic relapse is part of the etiology of addiction.”121
But of course I’m overstating when I say people don’t change. They do. I did. I could have turned out like my father. I could have remained a scientist. I could have—god help me—remained a Republican, as I was in my teens, or just as bad, a Democrat, as I was in my early twenties. People do change. But change takes hard work, luck, and some treasured reward on the other side; even when these are all present, it still doesn’t happen often. And that’s only on the scale of one person, with only one lifetime of momentum built into that trajectory. How much more difficult is it to expect change when we have six thousand years of history, as well as space heaters, major league baseball, tomatoes in January, strawberry cheesecake, and the capacity at any time to bid on 1,527,463 products (“most with ‘NO RESERVE PRICE’”) at ubid.com? And how much more difficult than that when those in power have prisons, guns, and sophisticated surveillance technologies at their disposal? And how much more difficult than that when those in power have television, newspapers, and compulsory schooling to promulgate their perspective? And how much more difficult than that when we promulgate it ourselves?
Several years ago the environmentalist and physician John Osborn pointed out to me that many environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a piece of ground and end up questioning the foundations of Western civilization. I agree, obviously, but would emend his comment in two ways. The first is that it’s not only environmentalists whose involvement in their particular struggle leads them to question the basis of this whole way of living. Feminists, conservation biologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, prison activists, American Indian activists (obviously), other people of color, those who simply hate the wage economy: I’ve spoken with people who are each of these, and they’ve reached the same conclusions. Why? Because once the questioning begins the search for root causes leads you back to the primary problem: the culture itself. And why is the problem the culture itself? Because this way of life is based on exploitation, domination, theft, and murder. And why is this culture based on exploitation, domination, theft, and murder? Because it’s based on the perceived right of the powerful to take whatever resources they want. If you perceive yourself as entitled to some resource—and if you’re unwilling or incapable of perceiving this other as a being with whom you can and should enter into a relationship—it doesn’t much matter whether the resource is land, gold, oil, fur, labor, or a warm, wet place to put your penis, nor does it matter who this other is, you’re going to take the resource.
The second way I would emend his comment is by adding the words in private. This questioning—and in fact rejection—of civilization happens almost exclusively in private, because a lot of these activists are afraid that if they spoke this in public, people would laugh at them, and they would lose whatever credibility they have—or feel they have. It’s always a difficult question. Do I stop this clearcut now, even knowing that without a fundamental change in the culture (see Premise Six) I’m merely putting off the date of execution till the next corporate Congress-man figures out the next way to make sure the timber companies get out the cut? Or do I tell the truth, stand by, and watch the trees fall? The environmentalists I know are hanging on by our fingernails, praying that salmon, grizzlies, lynx, bob-cat, Port Orford cedars survive till civilization comes down. If they survive, they’ll have a chance. If they don’t, they’re gone forever.
I’m sick of these options. I want to stop the destruction. I want to stop it now. I’m not satisfied to wait for civilization to exhaust its physical and metaphorical soil, then collapse. In the meantime it’s killing too many humans, too many nonhumans; it’s making too much of a shambles of the world.
The seventh premise of this book is: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.
Had somebody snuffed civilization in its multiple cradles, the Middle East would probably still b
e forested, as would Greece, Italy, and North Africa. Lions would probably still patrol southern Europe. The peoples of the region would quite possibly still live in traditional communal ways, and thus would be capable of feeding themselves in a still-fecund landscape.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we can say the same in Europe. Somehow stop the Greeks and Romans, and the indigenous people of Gaul, Spain, Germany probably still survive. Wolves might howl in England. Great auks might nest in France, providing year-round food for the humans who live there. Salmon might run in more than token numbers up the Seine. The Rhine would be almost undoubtedly clean. The continent would be forested. Many of the cultures would be matrifocal. Many would be peaceful.
Had someone brought down civilization before 1492, the Arawaks would probably still live peacefully in the Caribbean. Indians would live in ancient forests all along the Eastern seaboard, along with bison, marten, fisher. North, Central, and South America would be ecologically and culturally intact. The people would probably have, as always, plenty to eat.
Had someone brought down civilization before the slave trade took hold, 100 million Africans would not have been sacrificed on that particular altar of economic production. Native cultures might still live untraumatized on their own land all across that continent. There probably would be, as there always was, plenty to eat.
If someone had brought down civilization one hundred and fifty years ago, those who came after probably could still eat passenger pigeons and Eskimo curlews. They could surely eat bison and pronghorn antelope. They could undoubtedly eat salmon, cod, lobster. The people who came after would not have to worry about dioxin, radiation poisoning, organochloride carcinogens, or the extreme weather and ecological flux that characterize global warming. They would not have to worry about escaped genetically engineered plants and animals. There probably would have been, as almost always, plenty to eat.
If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, “Why did they not take it down?” Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying, “If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.”
I know someone whose brother demolishes buildings. The trick, he says, is to position the charges precisely so the building collapses in place, and doesn’t take out the surroundings. It seems to me that this is what we must do: position the charges so that civilization collapses in on itself, and takes out as little life as possible on its way down.
Part of the task of the rest of this exploration is to discover what form those charges will take, and where to put them.
The past few weeks I’ve been in crisis. I’m scared. Scared of the implications of this work. Scared to articulate what I know in my heart is necessary, and even more scared to help bring it about. I mean, we’re talking about taking down civilization here.
Last night I was at my mom’s eating dinner and watching a little March Madness—the NCAA basketball tournament—and I kept thinking, as I watched UNC-Wilmington hold off USC in overtime after blowing a nineteen-point lead, a variant of the question my friend asked about what right I have to not let people live in cities. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people having fun watching these games. They’re not trying to exploit anyone. They’re not trying to kill the planet. What right do I have to so alter their lives? I’m not saying there would never be games again, because the lives of traditional indigenous peoples the world over are far more full of leisure and play than ours. I’m just saying that bringing down civilization would cause substantive changes in the way these people spend their time. And they may not—evidently they do not—want to change.
The answer came to me today. It’s the same answer I gave my friend, which is that I think it’s the wrong question. The question is: what right do all of these people have to destroy the lives of others by their very lifestyle?
It’s hard. I would have no moral or existential problem destroying the lifestyles of those in power. The politicians, CEOs, generals, capitalist journalists. Those who, if faced with a Nuremberg-style tribunal, should and would find themselves at the end of a rope for their crimes against both the natural world and humanity. But what about Americans just trying to love their children and take them to the amusement park once a month, to buy them toys, to get them an education so they can get a job? If I were directing a movie instead of writing a book, it might be appropriate for me to add a montage of images of everyday life in civilization. Young children dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” at a minor-league baseball game. An audience watching Hamlet trying to decide whether he should kill the murderous king (You do regularly go to Shakespeare festivals, don’t you?). People walking the aisles of independent bookstores, stopping to pick titles from the shelves. An ice cream truck. A picnic. But then to round out the montage I’d have to include children starving because the resources they need to live have been stolen; denuded hillsides, blasted streams, dammed and polluted rivers (I just heard that most of the rivers of southern England are so hormone-polluted that more than half of the male fish—in some cases all—are changing gender); prisons full of bored adults who’ve been convicted of crimes; factories full of bored adults who’ve not been convicted of crimes but are nonetheless sentenced to years of tedium; classrooms full of bored children being prepared for their boring lives in office or factory; factory farms full of bored (and tortured) chickens, pigs, cows, or turkeys; laboratories full of bored (and tortured) chimpanzees, rats, rhesus monkeys, mice.
The question quickly becomes: what rights do people have? More specifically, does anyone have the right to enslave another? More specifically yet, does any group of people have the right to enslave others—human or nonhuman—simply because they have the power to do so, and because they perceive it as their right (and because they have created a propaganda system consisting of intertwined religious, philosophical, scientific, educational, informational, economic, governmental, and legal systems all working to convince themselves and at least some of their human victims it is their right)? If not, what are you going to do about it? How much will it take? How far will you go in order to stop those in power from enslaving—and killing—the mass of humans, and in fact the planet?
I often give talks, at universities and elsewhere. I gave one such talk last week. Just before I walked on stage, the person who brought me there whispered, “I forgot to tell you, but I publicized this as a speech about human rights. Can you make sure to talk about that?”
I nodded agreement, although I had no idea what to say. Everything that came to me was tepid, along the lines of “Human rights are good.” I may as well say I’m for apple pie and the girl next door. Even though I didn’t tell her this, I think she read my face. She smiled nervously. I smiled twice as nervously back. It’s a good thing we weren’t playing poker.
She went out to introduce me. I thought and thought, and wished there were a lot more upcoming events for her to talk about. I wished she would start announcing the day’s major league baseball scores. I wished she would forecast the weather, and tell the fortunes of the people in the front row. But she didn’t do any of that, and soon enough it was my turn. As I walked on stage, however, I suddenly knew what I had to say, and was reminded, as I often am, how quickly the mind can work under pressure, or at least how quickly it can work those times it doesn’t seize up altogether. “Most people,” I said, “who care about human rights and who talk about them in a meaningful fashion, as opposed to those who use them as a smokescreen to facilitate production and implement policies harmful to humans and nonhumans, usually spend a lot of energy demanding the realization of righ
ts those in power give lip service to. Sometimes they expand their demands to include things—like a livable planet—people don’t often associate with human rights. People have a right to clean air, we say, and clean water. We have a right to food. We have a right to bodily integrity. Women (and men) have the right to not be raped. Some even go so far as to say that nonhumans, too, have the right to clean air and water. They have the right to habitat. They have the right to continued existence.”
People nodded. Who but a sociopath or a capitalist—insofar as there is a difference—could disagree with any of these?
“But,” I continued, “I’m not sure that’s the right approach. I think that instead of adding rights we need to subtract them.”
Silence. Frowns. The narrowing of eyes.
“No one,” I said, “has the right to toxify a river. No one has the right to pollute the air. No one has the right to drive a creature to extinction, nor destroy a species’ habitat. No one has the right to profit from the labor or misery of another. No one has the right to steal resources from another.”
Endgame Vol.1 Page 11
