Any science of civilization will be a science of occupation, aiming toward ever more control of the occupied world, and toward the creation of ever more destructive technologies. Imagine the technologies that would be invented by a culture of inhabitation, that is, a sustainable culture, that is, a culture planning on being in the same place for ten thousand years. That culture would create technologies that enhance the landscape—what a concept! —and would decompose afterwards into components that help, not poison, the soil. The technologies would remind human inhabitants of their place in this landscape. The technologies would promote leisure, not production. The technologies would not be bombs and factory conveyor belts but perhaps stories, songs, and dances, and nets to catch set and sustainable numbers of salmon.
The Squamish people, who live near what is now Vancouver, British Columbia, tell this story: A long time ago, even before the time of the flood, the Cheakamus River provided food for the Squamish people. Each year, at the end of summer, when the salmon came home to spawn, the people would cast their cedar root nets into the water and get enough fish for the winter to come.
One day, a man came to fish for the winter. He looked into the river and found that many fish were coming home this year. He said thanks to the spirit of the fish for giving themselves as food for his family, and cast his net into the river and waited. In time, he drew his nets in and they were full of fish, enough for his family for the whole year. He packed these away into cedar bark baskets, and prepared to go home.
But he looked into the river and saw all those fish, and decided to cast his net again. And he did so, and it again filled with fish, which he threw onto the shore. A third time, he cast his net into the water and waited.
This time, when he pulled his net in, it was torn beyond repair by sticks, stumps, and branches which filled the net. To his dismay, the fish on the shore and the fish in the cedar bark baskets were also sticks and branches. He had no fish, his nets were ruined.
It was then he looked up at the mountain and saw Wountie, the spirit protecting the Cheakamus, who told him that he had broken the faith with the river and with nature, by taking more than he needed for himself and his family. And this was the consequence.
And to this day, high on the mountain overlooking the Cheakamus and Paradise Valley, is the image of Wountie, protecting the Cheakamus.
The fisherman? Well, his family went hungry and starved, a lesson for all the people.
Discourse under civilization is, as we see, a discourse of occupation, by which I mean there’s lots of talk of bread and circuses to keep us occupied while we’re systematically robbed of our landbase, our dignity, and our lives.
For example, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I have what I’ve taken to calling Angelina Jolie moments. I’ll be thinking about something else, and suddenly her image will pop up before me. I think it’s because I’m so upset with how she was treated by Billy Bob Thornton, and how scandalous their whole relationship was. I’m sure you’ve heard that each carried around the neck a vial of the other’s blood. And I’m sure you also heard that hubby Thornton sometimes said that when they were having sex he wanted to strangle her because he wanted them to be so close (see my previous discussion of the word fuck). But have you heard where she has his name tattooed? Ohmygosh, I’ll bet when it was being done she was wishing his name was Ed.
Speaking of genitals, did you know that Nicole Kidman doesn’t like to wear underwear? I read that in the newspaper, so it must be true. Nor did Marilyn Monroe. Nor, for that matter, did Tallulah Bankhead.
Stop.
Now, quick, what’s the indigenous name for the place you live? Who are the indigenous people whose land it is? What are five species of plants and animals who live (or lived) within one hundred yards of your home, and who have been harmed by civilization? What are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?
I find it odd and horribly disturbing that I can tell you—not from direct experience, mind you—what is on Angelina Jolie’s genitals, and what is not on Nicole Kidman’s, yet it took me two years of living in Tu’nes before I learned there was a massacre of several hundred Indians a few miles from my home at a place called Yontocket, another massacre nearby at a place called Achulet, and yet another at a place called Howonquet. I wonder how long it will take to learn of them all. Although I live in a riot of wildlife, I cannot name—or find—ten edible species outside my door (I think I should probably steer clear of those beautiful big red mushrooms with the small white spots). I’ve lived here almost four years, and it took me till last week to even learn of the existence of some new, or rather very old, neighbors: Aplodontia rufa, or mountain beavers (the oldest of the living rodents, a website says, also known for being hosts to the world’s largest fleas!).
It is beyond passing strange—I would say obscene, as well as absolutely typical—that so much of our discourse concerns so many pieces of information that do not matter to our lives—I think I can state categorically that the knowledge that Angelina Jolie has a tattoo on her genitals and that Nicole Kidman doesn’t wear panties will never make a tangible difference in my life—yet we know almost nothing of the land we inhabit, and of our living breathing neighbors who share this land.
That is a textbook example—textbook, as though a book written by someone far away carries more weight than my own direct idiosyncratic experience—of a discourse of occupation. Bring on the bread, and most especially bring on the circuses. And whatever you do, don’t wake me until it’s too late, until there’s nothing I can do to resist, until I can in no way be held responsible for my failure to effectively act.
The conflict resolution methods of a culture of occupation will be different from those of a culture of inhabitation. The Okanagans of what is now British Columbia, to provide a counterexample, have a concept they call En’owkin, which means “I challenge you to give me your most opposite perspective to mine. In that way I will know how to change my thinking so I can accommodate your concerns and problems.” The Okanagan writer and activist Jeannette Armstrong told me why her people developed this and similar technologies: “We don’t have any fewer problems than you guys getting along. But we know that whomever we’re having trouble with, their grandchild might marry our grandchild. So we have to accommodate one another. I have to ask myself how I can change to accommodate you. At the same time, because you, too, are Okanagan, you will be asking how you can change to accommodate me. We’re going to be leaning toward one another.” She talks of how all the people in her community share one skin. They share that skin with all of the people who came before, and all who will come after. This applies in a sense to their nonhuman neighbors as well.
In the dominant culture, familial and sexual relations are relations of occupation, not inhabitation. Rates of rape and child abuse reveal the degree to which the bodies of women and children are considered the property of their masters (husband: from Anglo-Saxon husbonda; hus, house, and bonda, master). Vaginas become resources to be exploited (or at the very least husbanded), and those who live in the bodies containing these resources become pesky inhabitants to be terrorized into giving up the resource.
But something even more intimate than our family lives is infected by this complex of beliefs: our sense of what we consider a self. Who are you? Who, precisely, is the you that you consider you? Chances are good it’s what Catherine Keller called the separative self, an isolated monad cut off from all others by psychological, spiritual, and existential barriers much stronger than skin. If your goal is to attempt to minimize acknowledging damage to yourself as you exploit others, this sort of self is just the ticket. If your goal is to inhabit relationships, this self is a really bad idea.
If you do believe you are a separative self, or act as though you believe you are a separative self, whom, exactly, are you cut off from? Do you consider your self to include your family? Your friends? The air you breathe? The Aplodontia rufia who live far closer to you than Angelina Jolie o
r Nicole Kidman? The solitary bees digging their nests in the dirt outside? The dirt itself, the living breathing dirt? The water that acts as intermediary between all of these? Are these all part of you? Are any of these part of you?
Or maybe you include only the parts of you that end at your fingertips. Or maybe you include even less than that. Maybe not even your emotions. Maybe not even your dreams. Maybe nothing but your thoughts. And maybe not even those.
I just got a note from a friend who put it well, “People never leave or even look outside the bubbles they create to meet their own immediate gratification. This is how we’re taught to live: it’s the city model on a micro level. These hollow beings (be they cities or people) suck in everything from around them and create a wall of aggression to keep outsiders outside. The more hollow and empty they realize they’ve become on the inside, the more fiercely they attack, disable, and devour their surroundings. It occurs to me that in a very real sense, we cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”
She continued, “People see that the culture—and the same is true for many of our relationships—is broken in so many ways, and so unsustainable, but are terrified to probe too deep, because they think if it—civilization, their intimate relationship, whatever—crumbles, there might be nothing left. This is how we enter into these bubbles of perception—they form our earliest passage from a world of love to a world of fear and denial. It begins with wanting connection. And then we settle for something less, because we think the alternative is nothing at all. But our truth is still there—all of it is still there. We could wake up any time and reclaim the whole of our existence.”174
Precisely because those in power are so dependent (for their power, for their lives) on those they exploit, they must convince themselves and especially these others the opposite is true. Between open-mouthed kisses, fathers tell daughters no man could ever treat them so well. As carcinogens accumulate in our bodies (in our bones, organs, fat) movies, TV shows, magazines, and newspapers inculcate us to believe that without police (who count it among their jobs to protect the property and processes of polluters from the outrage and bombs of dying citizens) we would all be murdered in our sleep. As bombs (their bombs, never our bombs) fall on human beings around the globe (human beings who want to live and love and be loved and see their children grow to live and love and be loved) we are told by politicians that bombs (their bombs, never our bombs) are necessary to make the world safe for something they call democracy. As forests are felled, rivers poisoned, soil toxified, as we see beautiful wild places we love destroyed, as we watch our grandparents, cousins, brothers, sisters, lovers, children, ourselves wasting away from cancer, the whole culture tells us time and again the same message: you cannot survive without this culture, without civilization.
All of these messages are feasible only because of outrageous narrowing and blurring of our ability to perceive and to think clearly. Safety must be made to seem dangerous, and danger must be made to seem safe. Benevolence comes to be called violence, and violence comes to be called benevolence. Fear feels like love, and love feels like fear.
I have experienced this. My father trained me well. I hated him when I was young, for the rapes I endured, the beatings I witnessed. But when he left, when I was maybe ten, I also felt deeply betrayed, and I hated him all the more for this further betrayal. At the time we did not talk about it, but I later learned from my sister that my father also raped her, and that she felt something similar when he left. She ran away. Later he came back. I hated him even worse for that. Later he left again. Still I hated him. I hated him for what he did to me, and I hated him for leaving behind a hollowed-out shell of me when he left.
All of this was precisely the sort of preparation I would need for a life of giving myself away, preparation for a process of schooling in which I was to give myself away to teachers, in preparation for a life of wage slavery, when I was to give myself away to the highest (monetary) bidder. I was similarly prepared to give myself away in personal relationships. The idea was that I should give myself away to those who held power over me until I had nothing left to give.
I am not unique.
That is what is expected of all of us.
That is what is expected of the world, that it give to those in power until it has nothing left to give.
But do we need to live like this? Do we need these masters? Do we need to give ourselves away to those who do not hold our best interests at heart, and do we need to allow them to hollow us out, and to hollow out the places we love?
It’s very scary. Having been hollowed out, having been told time and again that we cannot exist without the social systems that lead to our degradation, it is very easy to come to believe we cannot live without them. No matter how much we hate our jobs, could we live without the capitalists who run the country? No matter how much we hate ExxonMobil, could we live without the oil it sucks from the earth and transforms into the very lifeblood of the industrial economy? No matter how much I hated my father, could I have lived without him? (Well, yes. I discovered quickly I could live without him, and have long done so. Since he no longer touches my life, I no longer even hate him.)
How deeply do we hold this belief that not only is civilization ���a high stage of social and cultural development,” but that we simply could not survive without it? How would we eat if we could not go to Safeway or Ray’s Food Place (or KFC or Carl’s Jr)? How would we clothe ourselves if we did not receive regular catalogs from J. Crew? I live now in the relatively stable climes of coastal northern California (average daily summer high, maybe sixty-five; average nightly winter low, maybe forty-five), but have lived most of my life where it gets cold: Colorado (last spring snow, June 16), northeastern Nevada (last spring freeze, July 4), North Idaho, and eastern Washington. Could I construct, using Stone Age tools, a shelter that would help keep me alive through a winter?
The answer to all of these is, not by myself.
But does that mean I—or you—could not survive without civilization?
That depends, first of all, on who you are. If you are a wild creature—although I doubt many Del Norte Salamanders will read this book, however much they may applaud (with their cute soft hands on stumpy little arms) my analysis—you could almost certainly live without civilization, and in fact almost certainly won’t live if it’s allowed to continue. I say “almost certainly” because while most nonhumans are harmed by civilization, nonhumans are by no means monolithic (part of our problem is so many of us consider “nature” to be something singular). Some—such as Norwegian rats, kudzu, and starlings—benefit mightily from civilization through the increase of their habitat and eradication of competitors and predators. Some microbes, too, benefit. Civilization has been such a boon to many microbes who feed off humans (especially overstressed humans in close quarters) that I’ve read persuasive arguments that microbes, not humans, are responsible for cities, which are in this perspective nothing more than microbe feedlots and factory farms. (These arguments always make me wonder if there are “human rights” activists among the microbes who complain about intolerable and “inmicrobane” living conditions humans are forced to endure in cities: “It’s okay to eat them,” say these viral activists, “but they should be allowed to live with dignity first!”)
Nonetheless, for blue whales, spotted owls, hammerhead sharks, and Javan rhinos to survive, civilization has to go.
Soon.
But who cares about nonhumans, right? If they can’t adapt to civilization, fuck ’em. We want to know about the only creatures who matter. Could humans survive without civilization?
Well, we have for more than 99 percent of our existence. But does that matter now? Could humans survive given current numbers? Perhaps more central to the concerns of most of the civilized, could we maintain our lifestyle (note that the question has not-so-subtly shifted from survival of living, breathing human beings to the capacity to maintain a capitalist, consumerist lifestyle
where the rich buy second homes while the poor die of starvation and the world gets trashed)? Would taking down civilization cause massive deaths, massive suffering? Clearly more important to many, would we still be able to use the internet? I’ll examine these questions later in greater detail, but for now let’s break humans into quick subcategories, recognizing that humans are no more monolithic than cheetahs.
I think we—at least those of us who consider genocide a bad thing—can safely say traditional indigenous people living traditional ways would be better off if civilization disappeared tomorrow. They’d have been far better off if it had disappeared a long time ago. They could easily survive—and would survive better—without it.
The rural poor would also survive better without civilization. With no one to dispossess them, to use their land for cash crops, they could return to the subsistence farming that has supported them for a very long time. Recall the quote by the member of the tupacamaristas: “We need to be able to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.” The rural poor of the world know how to keep themselves alive. They merely need to be allowed to do so.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 22
