A Language Older Than Words (18 page)

Both mothers reacted instantly, grabbing the four-year-old and shouting, "Bad girl! You're a very bad girl!"

All conversation stopped, as though someone had hit a pause button. When talk resumed, I no longer heard the women, but only saw them shaking the girl and shouting. I began to tremble.

I wanted to run to the women and ask them to stop. I don't know why I didn't. The child was frozen. Perhaps she was used to this and benumbed. Some of the other children seemed terrified. Most adults seemed oblivious. Perhaps they, too, were used to it.

The women continued to shout, and continued to shake the girl. I made my way outside and sat on the curb.

A few minutes later the mother of the four year old emerged, pushing a stroller in which there was another infant. The four year old held tight to the stroller.

My friend followed them out the door, and it happened that we walked in the same direction as the woman and children.

The mother continued to berate the child. Another woman in the parking lot pounded on her hood, laughing and shouting, "You tell her."

Why doesn't anyone stop this, I wondered. Why don't I?

For two blocks I walked behind the woman. Over and over she said, "You're a bad girl!" I knew if the child heard it often enough she would believe it. My hands were shaking. I thought I would throw up, and wanted to do something. I didn't know what to do.

Suddenly I became very calm. I knew what was necessary. Without thinking, I walked to the woman and said, "I saw what happened, and what she did wasn't that bad."

"She struck an infant."

"Don't you realize that every time you say these things, you're doing the same to her?"

The woman's jaw dropped. For a moment she stood in the middle of the street, naked and vulnerable. Then her defenses returned and she shouted at me, "This is none of your business."

I thought, of course this is my business. The child doesn't belong to you; she belongs to herself. She deserves to be treated with respect, honor, love, and tenderness. We all do. I couldn't say any of this, though, because the woman was now jerking away, pulling the child behind her.

....

Clearly, most of us working to protect the natural world hope our society will soon change direction. Without a fundamental shift in the way we act, the best of our efforts will in the long run add up to nothing, only affording a few more generations of lynx, bobcat, grizzly bear, and so on, the opportunity to live out harried lives before we ultimately exterminate them. Most everyone I know doesn't believe a cultural change of heart will happen voluntarily, which means that many of us are simply doing what we can to protect the few remaining pockets of biological and societal integrity until the system collapses. If after that those humans who survive are of good heart, and are willing to listen to the natural world, they may be able to relearn how to live with what the land gladly offers. If that happens, there may be hope for the continuation of life on the planet.

The bottom line with regard to what will survive seems to be this: if the urge to dominate as manifested by our culture is instinctual, there is no hope for humans, and not much hope for any other large forms of life. Those humans who come after will continue in this path we have followed, a path determined for us long before the rise of our species, long before the appearance of mammals, reptiles, fish, mold, bacteria, or even proteins. If what we're doing is natural, our path became biologically overdetermined when the rules for the game of life were set up: those capable of dominating will; those incapable will be eliminated. According to this perspective, the destruction of dodo birds, to choose just one example, may have been regrettable, but we simply couldn't help ourselves, and in any case they were unfit for survival. As for indigenous peoples, they, too, are "inferior" and must make way as we "invoke and remorselessly fulfill the inexorable law of natural selection."
I'm sorry,
we'll say,
but that's the way the world goes.

An imposing body of literature supports this view of humans as inherently destructive, and a complementary view of nature as a cutthroat competition for survival. The Bible, of course, and the mainstream of Christianity are explicit in their condemnation of humanity as sinful, and mortal existence as a vale of hardship and tears. Science, too, gets in its licks, phrased now in terms of Natural instead of Divine Law.

Here's an example: I just read a popular book called
Demonic Males.
The authors state that because rape occurs in orangutans, rape and other violence by human males is, to use their word, "natural." While stating that parallels between human and non-human behaviors "justify nothing," they also state that "rape as an
ordinary
part of a species' behavior implies that it is an evolved adaptation." Recognizing the ubiquity of rape within our culture (but inaccurately extending it cross-culturally), they give their evolutionarily-ordained reasoning for rape: "By a logic that challenges our strongest moral principles it could pay the woman to acknowledge the rapist's power and form a relationship that, while initially repellent, she comes to accept." We need to remind ourselves that they are attempting to "justify nothing" as we read that "a demonstration of power implies that the female's safest future is to bond with the violent male." The authors have assumed not only the "true nature" of what we perceive as rape in orangutans, but also that orangutans are what Descartes would have called "beast-machines" driven by instincts—with no great measure of volition or cultural imperative—such that all actions performed by them become, by definition, natural, or rather Natural. While mentioning the human cultures (indigenous and non-indigenous) in which rape has existed, they ignore the many cultures in which rape was—beyond nonexistent—inconceivable until the members of these cultures were taught by example what it means to be civilized.

Wars of extermination somehow become Natural as well: the authors conclude that "neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society." But to make this statement, the authors are forced to ignore scores of peaceful cultures. They must ignore the difference between feuds and raiding parties, forms of ritualized violence where humiliation is the goal, and genocide. These are crucial differences. To ignore the qualitative and quantitative differences between counting coup and, not only using, but having
invented
something like napalm is to be entirely deaf to any reasonable sense of morality.

Take the Semai, of Malaya, to provide just one example among many: "As long as they have been known to the outside world," one anthropologist who lived with them wrote, "they consistently fled rather than fight, or even run the risk of fighting." The Semai never strike their children, nor strike each other. When they speak in Malay, they translate the verb
to hit as to kill.
If two people quarrel, the worst they may do is call each other "cockroach," or some other name. The quarrel goes no farther, but is taken to a third party for resolution. The Semai believe that to make another person unhappy is to increase the probability that the other will suffer an accident. This is something they try to avoid under all circumstances. These characteristics have caused many Westerners to label the Semai as "timid," or "weak." The authors of
Demonic Males
ignore them altogether.

Such obviously selective scholarship in defense of the status quo perplexes me as much as any other manifestation of our culture's destructiveness. The question I keep asking myself—as I watch the
Spokesman's
editors insist that any concern regarding lead pollution is unnecessary because "there are no human bodies lining the Spokane River," or as the authors of
Demonic Males
deftly ignore the hundreds of human cultures that are based on cooperation and peacefulness—is this: Are these people evil, or are they stupid? We stumble over ourselves to avoid the truth, to
avoid the many grenades that are slowly wobbling across the floor.
The answer seems to be that in making ourselves blind we become evil
and
stupid
.
We are afraid what it would mean were we to see.

Although the authors state that "patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide," and comes out of men's "evolutionarily derived efforts to control women," it took me only an hour to find a description of the Paliyans, indigenous forest hunters of India, for whom "independence of authority is a treasured right. Neither spouse can order the other, and neither, by virtue of sex or age, is entitled to a greater voice in matters of mutual concern." It took me another fifteen minutes to find that the Bushmen live—or rather used to, before they were civilized—such that "the status of husband and wife are on terms of equality, which precludes any prediction that a husband or wife will follow the lead of the other." And then I read the words of the Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune, who wrote in the seventeenth century that "the Savage tribes . . . cannot chastise a child, nor see one chastised."

"How much trouble this will give us," Le Jeune lamented, "in carrying out our plans for teaching the young!" When Le Jeune upbraided an Indian man for the sexual freedom his wife enjoyed (he was not sure he was the father of her child), the Indian responded, "Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe."

The examples are there, if only we look.

And while it is certainly unfair to single out the authors of
Demonic Males,
they serve as important examples. These authors are not
exceptionally
bad scholars. They have simply said what people want, and perhaps need, to hear. Our culture has never lacked for apologists, and, as was true of Chivington, Descartes, St. Paul, St. Crysotom, and Martin Luther, the authors of
Demonic Males
are
not alone. As is true for much religion and philosophy, a primary purpose of anthropology has been the legitimization of behavior patterns. Among many others, the anthropologists E.E. Evans Pritchard("men are always in the ascendancy"), E.R. Leach ("male domination has always been the norm in human affairs"), Claude Levi-Strauss ("women are commodities"), and Steven Goldberg
(The Inevitability of Patriarchy)
have attempted to naturalize male domination. Like the authors of
Demonic Males,
the Jewish symphony members who ignored their burning synagogue, me as I gave away memories of
my own experiences, or my mother as she obscured signs of sexual
abuse in order to get through the day, our society simply ignores any evidence that could potentially threaten our view of the universe. Unstated always, and ignored as surely as the evidence itself, are the ulterior motives that hide beneath. It should not be terribly surprising that people would ignore the world to rationalize exploitation. In order to exploit, we must deafen ourselves to the voices of those we are victimizing. The justification of this exploitation would demand that we continue with our selective deafness, selective blindness, and selective stupidity.

But maybe I'm proceeding as selectively as the authors whose work I have maligned. Perhaps I, too, am trying to impose an order on the universe to match the needs of my interior life. Stars speak? Cradle me? Coyotes agree to deals, and ducks offer their lives to me? Mice retaliate on my bathroom counter, and we all participate in a dance of courtesy and the giving of gifts? There is no blood in this, no sharpness of tooth and claw. Perhaps my efforts at ordering the universe are as pathetic as those I criticize. Maybe, after all these years, I'm still a frightened little boy trying desperately to find love (or at least safety) in a violent household—in a violent universe—where none exists, and so I project, ignore evidence, do everything I have accused others of doing; I will do anything to avoid that one most basic truth of all—that I am entirely alone.

I do not know the interior nature of the universe, nor the essential truth about evolution. But if there is one thing I know about natural selection it is this: creatures who have survived in the long run, have survived
in the long run.
It is not possible to survive in the long run by taking from your surroundings more than you give back, in other words, one cannot survive in the long run through the domination of one's surroundings. It is quite clearly in the best interest of a bear to make sure that the salmon return and that berries ripen. They can eat them, but they cannot hyperexploit them and still expect to survive. Insofar as competitors enrich and enliven the natural community in which they live, it is in the bear's best interest to see that they, too, thrive, which it does by doing nothing—by simply being a bear. The same can be said for deer, who couldn't survive without wolves or other predators, and for wolves, who couldn't survive without deer. The same can be said for all of us—human and nonhuman alike—that we cannot long survive unless we cooperate with those around us.

It seems likely that no one living today will ever experience a fully natural interaction with either another human or nonhuman. All observations, including my own, are made as through a glass darkly, because we now live in a world of refugees.

The Yanomame Indians are a violent and misogynistic group of people, but how much of that violence has developed in defensive response to marauding Europeans? We shall never know what they were like before, nor will we know anything about peaceful groups. After encountering the Arawaks, Christopher Columbus wrote: "They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrously timid.... [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one could believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them." The Arawaks were exterminated for their kindness.