 Derrick Jensen's book A Language Older Than Words
left me physically shaken. I read it, about five years ago, in one
sitting, in 36 hours without sleep, and more than once I threw it down
as if I'd been stung. It is horrifying reading, but worldview changing.
Its message is that civilization is inherently violent and relentlessly
destructive and repressive, and keeps us all in line through hierarchy,
threatened scarcity and learned helplessness: "the fear of not having enough".
Since
then, I've read everything Jensen has written, joined his discussion
forum and occasionally exchanged e-mails with him. At first I found his
pessimism discouraging, but he's been on the front lines of
environmental activism for years, so he knows what's really going on.
Over the past five years, I have grown increasingly radical in my views
on the changes we need to make, and what it will take to make them, but
I've always been a few steps behind Jensen, who has no qualms about
responding to violence with violence when other methods fail, and who
has occasionally chastised those who merely talk and write about the
need for change for "sitting back and
theorizing and spiritualizing and hanging out and not actually doing
anything".
I recognize that I'm one of those people, yet I
haven't changed. Fifty four years old and still not ready to put my
money where my mouth is. I criticize the technophiles and humanists who
preach that technology will save us, or that a growing global human
consciousness will save us, but I'm no better than them. They may be
apologists for inaction, but I'm the personification of inaction. (This
is not a plea for your appreciation -- I accept that my blog helps a
little by getting its small readership more aware of what is happening
and what is needed, but this is surely not enough).
Last year I
made peace with myself, acknowledged that I am who I am, vowed to do
more within the communities of which I am apart -- the lovely protected
piece of wetland where we live, my neighbourhood and my family and my
professional and blog networks, to do what I can to make life and Earth
a little better, to follow my Genius of Imagining Possibilities and my
Purpose of Fomenting Change. I acknowledged that all of this will not
prevent but only make the crash of civilization a little less horrific
for those I somehow touch, but still I cut myself a little slack.
Jensen's long-awaited next (and perhaps last?) book, endgame, has just been published. This month's Orion magazine has an excerpt,
and I'm taking the liberty of reproducing it here, both because it is
impossible to condense his powerful message in a review, and because I
wanted to respond to each of the points he makes, so I have framed the
excerpt as a 'conversation' -- his words in black, my reply indented in
red (I think that will that work in RSS feedreaders). I hope it will encourage you to read Jensen's work, buy the
2-volume endgame, and think, or even better act, on his ideas. So here goes:
Beyond Hope, by Derrick Jensen
The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We're fucked.
Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using
whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have,
which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use,
which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to
protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release
of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group
of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect
just one tree.
Here's how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist
and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: "As things become
increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If
grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they
may still be alive in fifty. If they're gone in twenty, they'll be gone
forever."
[This
reminds me of the protests of denial from those who we hold up as
paragons of courage. Courage, they say, is just doing what has to be
done; there is no other choice. Committing oneself to a life of
activism isn't a matter of self-sacrifice, it's just getting your head
out of your ass long enough to see what has to be done. The problem is,
we don't really want to know. If I really wanted to know, I'd be out now protesting the Canadian cormorant slaughter.
I am afraid that if I went I would end up getting arrested, and getting
others arrested, because I wouldn't be able to sit by passively and
just witness it. I then imagine other protesters complaining that I
have undermined their movement. But perhaps my violence would be not
only warranted, but necessary?
The real reason I don't want to
know, though, is that I have seen activists, doing what they must,
disappear from public view. There is so much to be done that every tiny
focus of work that must be done -- the saving of one small species, the
fight against one single development, the effort to stop a single
atrocity -- becomes a full-time job. I don't want to disappear. I think
I would drown. I think the realization of how little one person can
really do would kill me.]
But no matter what
environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We're losing
badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the
planet, and most people don't care.
Frankly, I don't have much
hope. But I think that's a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to
the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is
causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the
false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or
technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha
Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes
lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother
stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women's
shelters in the '50s and '60s, but another was her false hope that he
would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us
to real possibilities.
Does anyone really believe that
Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does
anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we
ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will
be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will
be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things
will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not
okay, and they're getting worse. Rapidly.
But it isn't only
false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself.
Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the
end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way
into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection
against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we
continue if we do not have hope?
We've all been taught that hope
in some future condition—like hope in some future heaven—is and must be
our refuge in current sorrow. I'm sure you remember the story of
Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open
it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and
mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the
lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes,
was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to
this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of
action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to
alleviate or eliminate one's misfortune.
The more I understand
hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box
with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of
those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.
Hope
is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely
Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only
because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we
are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this
because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more
or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe—or maybe you
would—how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the
apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But
what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked
me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here's
the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.
I'm
not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just
will. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish
writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope
that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To
hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it.
Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the
world. By saying that, they've assumed that the destruction will
continue, at least in the short term, and they've stepped away from
their own ability to participate in stopping it.
[I
have received a lot of e-mail recently from readers who think my
writing has become too 'hopeless', too resigned to the enormity and
impossibility of the task of 'saving the world'. The title of my blog
was originally intended ironically. Over time, as my study of the state
of the world and the possibilities for changing it evolved, it ceased
to be so. I became hopeful.
And then as I learned more, I became pessimistic, despairing. Not
enough to stop blogging, but enough to try to instill readers with a
more realistic sense of what we can hope to accomplish. To some extent
this blog's title has again become ironic.
I've lost some
readers in the process. The world is complex, but people want it
simplified. They want simple answers. As I've become less hopeful, I've
realized there are no simple answers. There are not even complicated
answers. The only answers are horrifically complex ones, hopeless ones.
Answers that say We're fucked, no matter what we do, but we still have
a responsibility to do what we can anyway. Ugh. Who wants to hear that?]
I
do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make
sure the dominant culture doesn't drive them extinct. If coho want to
leave us because they don't like how they're being treated—and who
could blame them?—I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they
do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.
When
we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have
to "hope" at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive.
We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.
When
we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the
awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop
hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally
free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say
that when hope dies, action begins.
People sometimes ask me, "If
things are so bad, why don't you just kill yourself?" The answer is
that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I
can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really
fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am
full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness,
satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are
really fucked. Life is still really good.
[Well, maybe. For many of us, it is life's promise that is good. It's what we could become.
It's the potential. Many of us daydream our lives away, buying lottery
tickets, imagining ourselves on American Idol or the New York Yankees
or surrounded by adoring admirers in thrall to our sexual magnetism, or
living vicariously through our children, or through 'successful' or
beautiful people we know, or even through complete strangers
(celebrities). As I keep saying, the scarce resources we most crave are
appreciation and attention, and most of us have no hope of ever getting
much of either. So we cling to our dreams, the possibilities we know
are really impossible. For many of us, life is not really good. It is
only the promise that it could be that keeps us going.]
Many
people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow
themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must
then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel
many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely
appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably
also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate
things are, they may be forced to do something about it.
Another
question people sometimes ask me is, "If things are so bad, why don't
you just party?" Well, the first answer is that I don't really like to
party. The second is that I'm already having a great deal of fun. I
love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We
are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.
I
have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse
for inaction. I've learned that if you deprive most of these people of
that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then
another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction—the use of any
excuse to justify inaction—reveals nothing more nor less than an
incapacity to love.
[True.
But things are the way they are for a reason. We all judge others by
ourselves, and that's not fair. The excuse for inaction isn't the
desperate situation, it's the refusal to accept that it's desperate. And of course
that reveals an incapacity for love. Our culture beats the capacity for
love out of us, makes us numb, fearful, hard-hearted, insensate. The
loss of capacity to love isn't something to be ashamed of, or something
we have control over. It's a coping mechanism. Derrick Jensen doesn't
need it, despite the fact he's been beaten more than most of us. Bravo
to him for that. He's strong. Most of us are not. And it's unfair of
him to be angry or impatient with people who are weaker than he is. We
are what we are, and we do what we must,
not what we can. Most of us, if we were honest enough to admit it, are
mostly dead. Much of the sensitivity, the capacity we had when we were
children, is gone. I know that's an outrageous and offensive notion,
but I think it's true.]
At one of my recent talks
someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason
people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves.
Effectiveness really doesn't matter, he said, and it's egotistical to
think it does.
I told him I disagreed. Doesn't activism make you feel good? he asked. Of course,
I said, but that's not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can
just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.
Why?
Because I'm in love.
With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in
sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the
duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course
results matter to you, but they don't determine whether or not you make
the effort. You don't simply hope your beloved survives and thrives.
You do what it takes. If my love doesn't cause me to protect those I
love, it's not love.
[Ah,
love. Tom Robbins says the greatest challenge in life is learning "how
to make love last". Nothing lasts forever. Love is our body's way of
getting us to do things it 'thinks' we must. It consumes a lot of
energy. What John Gray calls biophilia,
the love of all life on Earth, is still a part of us, and we renew it
from time to time when we reconnect with the Earth, with Gaia, but it
is now well-sublimated, and we cannot afford to feel that much for
something that is dying, quickly, inexorably. Love exhausts and
consumes us. We cannot afford to love the Earth that much. It is too
much suffering. Most of us, finally, to be able to go on, to live, have
to turn away.]
A wonderful thing happens when you give
up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first
place. You realize that giving up on hope didn't kill you. It didn't
even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective,
because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your
problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved
through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra
Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and
you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.
When
you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing
you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's
a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in
power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not
through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this
way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love,
you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still
alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that
when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the
you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that
those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who
believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in
order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you
died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped,
molded you died. The victim died.
And
who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you.
Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you
who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are.
The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part
of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend
your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love.
The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life
and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not
based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the
planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and
connection to your family, your friends, your landbase—not to your
family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a
landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have
been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.
When
you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by so being are
really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of
rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that
abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant
culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these
exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such
that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict
this cooption on themselves?
But when you give up on hope, this
exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who
participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When you give up on hope,
you turn away from fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead
begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become
very dangerous indeed to those in power. In case you're wondering,
that's a very good thing.
[I have written lately about Living On the Edge.
I am not sure you need to 'die' metaphorically to escape the clutches,
promises, addictions, reliance and false comforts of civilization. I
think there is a bit of romanticism in this use of the term death, too
close for comfort to the religious idea of resurrection. The Edge is a
place of lowered expectations, less confidence, but most importantly less reliance
on the complex systems that constitute our civilization. Hope is really
about reliance, isn't it? Reliance on those who are destroying the
Earth, or on a religious belief (and our current faith in non-existent
'free markets' and benevolent future technologies is nothing if not
religious) is really hope that 'they' will somehow save us. The end of reliance -- especially moral and emotional
reliance -- on civilization is, I think, a form of liberation.
Less dramatic than death, but more metaphorically honest perhaps. When
we give up relying on a set of systems and ideologies (which is what
civilization ultimately is) we give up hoping that it will somehow
solve the problems that must be solved, or at least coped with. We give
up hope in it.
But we do not give up hope. We, and hope, are still alive, to the
extent any of us is still alive after all the damage civilization has
(as a means of trying to sustain itself rather than maliciously)
inflicted on us.
I'm not strong on the idea of 'good versus
evil'. I don't see it in nature, so I have to believe it's a human
construct, and I strongly suspect it was invented to keep us in our
place, to frighten us into submission to those who make such moral
judgements. I can't blame the powers that be for inventing this
construct -- it's very effective and reduces the number of people who
need to be killed to keep civilization functioning. I use the term atrocity
a lot, in the sense of insensitively inflicting damage and suffering on
others, but I don't believe atrocity is inherent in human nature, or in
nature. You need to be either ignorant or emotionally dead to commit
atrocities, and in civilization culture both are tolerated, even (in
Darwinian terms) selected for. In nature they are not: If you're
ignorant you will die, from exposing yourself foolishly to a predator
or eating a poison food you didn't learn to avoid. If you're
emotionally dead you will be shunned by others in your community and
you will die of exposure and solitude. Atrocity is just an unintended
consequence of civilization. I'm not surprised that people respond to
atrocity with anger and violence -- when I am exposed to it I respond
the same way. At some point I will likely choose to expose myself to it
more -- I am tired of not doing enough. But I sympathize as well with
those who choose to hide from the terrible truth of atrocity. We are
not all meant to be warriors.
I don't want to die, even
metaphorically. I don't want to give up hope. I am not yet comfortable
living on the Edge, but I'm getting there. I no longer have hope for
civilization, and my expectations of myself and others are much lower
than they were. We're in for some hard times, and our children and
grandchildren unimaginably harder ones. I no longer love, or live, as
fully as I once did, or might have if I had been born outside of
civilization's terrible and wonderful hold. No one is to blame for that. Yet as I become more knowledgeable and more radical and more determined to do what I know I must, and therefore will (as little and as late as that may be), I am becoming, strangely, more at peace.] |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
