A Language Older Than Words (19 page)

These are some observations that are worth our consideration. We know that groups of Yanomame who were better hidden from European influence are less misogynistic and less violent than their troubled cousins. Our violence has reversed the rule of cooperative natural selection, such that those who fight possibly survive, and those who don't fight will most likely die. The inverse is true as well: those who survive learn how to fight, or more precisely, those who survive learn by painful experience to deafen themselves to their own suffering, and the suffering of others. The deafness facilitates the perpetration of extreme violence since extreme violence and survival are now associated. The violence leads only to further deafness, each furthering the other in a spiral of attenuated feelings until at long last we mimic "beast-machines"—horribly frightened, and not so very rational after all.

I do not know what my brothers would have become without exposure to my father's violence. Nor do I know the same about my sisters or my mother. Nor also do I know what it would have been like to have a father whose parents had not transformed him through their own violence. With no notion of what a peaceful family or a peaceful culture might have to offer, I am now a refugee from my own childhood. The millions of rape victims around the world are refugees from a worldview that was not inevitable, but chosen. We all—human and nonhuman alike—are refugees from the war zone that is civilization.

We would not expect studies made of Russians fleeing the advance of Nazi panzers in World War II, or later suffering under the eyes of
Einsatzgruppen,
to adequately reflect ordinary—nonstressed—human behavior, so why do we assume that anthropological studies—by definition performed by members of the dominant culture or those at least partially assimilated, under rules devised by the dominant culture, for the benefit and perpetuation of that same culture—reveal any more about the ordinary—nonstressed—state of humans? The same can be asked about studies of nonhumans. What makes us think, as we systematically destroy their homes and exploit them, that they will act around us as they ordinarily do—perhaps fearlessly, perhaps cooperatively—or even that they are any more capable of acting as they would have before?

What happens to those who are so stupid—or perhaps so principled—that they do not modify their behavior to protect themselves in this war zone? The dodos, a product of their benign environment, were fearless when they first encountered
Europeans. We cured them of that fearlessness by destroying them,
as we cured the Arawak people, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew.

The violence of civilization provides us with two options. We can distance ourselves from the world of experience, sense, and emotion, or we can die. I've tried the first, and I'm not ready for the second. We need a third option.

Breaking Out

"The world of the concentration camps . . .
was not an exceptionally monstrous society.
What we saw there was the image, and in a
sense the quintessence, of the infernal soci
ety into which we are plunged every day."
Eugene lonesco

I’M NOT SUGGESTING THAT there is no selfishness in the world, nor that the world would be a better place if we'd "stop acting so selfishly." We
would be
better off if we were to act in our own best interest. No one benefitted from my childhood. No one benefits from rape. Hitler benefited no one, not even himself. Who benefits from the production of plutonium? Who benefits from the production of weapons of mass destruction? Who benefits from the use of pesticides? Who benefits from the eradication of indigenous peoples? Answer: no one you know, or would care to meet. To believe we're acting out of self-interest would be to buy into the presumption that our way of living serves us well, and that the destruction is merely an unfortunate by-product, a grotesque trade-off made by the rest of the world.

There's a sense in which the last part of this equation is true: the hyperconsumerism that marks our way of life is predicated on the exploitation of human and nonhuman "resources" worldwide who pay with their own misery—remember the 150,000,000 children enslaved; the billion chickens per year crammed into metal cages—to create monetarily cheap consumables. But the second half does not equal the first: the consumer lifestyle does not lead to living well, and it is not in anyone's best interest. This is not to say that, all other things being equal, and remaining snugly within the constricting framework of our culture, I would rather be poor than rich. But that is part of the problem: by systematically eliminating alternatives— try to withdraw from the cash-and-wage economy and live in the United States as a hunter-gatherer—we've confined ourselves in a kind of prison.

Just as at Auschwitz, or in other situations of perpetual trauma, circumstances can be created in which people are so oppressed and their options so narrowly circumscribed that it pays to exploit others, to make certain that they themselves get the easier job or the last scrap of potato, to make certain they can hop like a frog longer than the people who must be killed that day (or in our case, receive a pink slip). In a concentration camp, it is better (in terms of maintaining physical life: spiritual life is an entirely different question) to be the killer than the killed, better to be a collaborator than a resister, a guard than a collaborator, a supervisor than a guard, and better still to be the boss. But of course it would be better to not be in the camp at all.

Our way of life presupposes that it's in our best interest to coerce others into doing what we want them to do. This presupposition is manifested in our economics—by definition, the purpose of capitalism is to amass enough wealth to put others to work for you—and it's enshrined in our scientific explanation of the world. As the influential sociobiologist Richard Dawkins puts it: "Natural selection favours genes which control their survival machines
[survival machines
and
lumbering robots
are, sadly enough, two terms Dawkins uses for humans and other living beings] in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species." But this presupposition—that it's in our best interest to exploit others— is valid only for the extremely confining and specific circumstances of people living under constant threat of trauma, those who cannot afford to build and maintain relationships. Do we "make the best use of” our friends? If so, what does that say about
our friendships? I remember once hearing an economist speak about
"the way people are." He evoked his teenage years when he shared milkshakes with friends, two straws to a glass, and each would pull on the straw for all he was worth, trying to get the most shake. My own teenage experience was far different; my friends and I would generally insist the other take the last of whatever we were sharing. The relationship, and my friend's feelings, were always more important than the material at hand. To take more than my share would have meant the end of a friendship.

Part of the reason we've been able to convince ourselves that by exploiting others we're acting in our own best interest is that we've accepted a severely constricted definition of self. My father may have gotten off during his visits to my room late at night, but what did that do to his soul and to our relationship? Is it in a father's best interests to terrorize his son, to establish control through a hierarchy based on size and strength? It's all very well and good for the authors of
Demonic Males
to theorize that "it could pay the woman to acknowledge the rapist s power and form a relationship that, while initially repellent, she comes to accept," and that "a demonstration of power implies that the female’s safest future is to bond with the violent male," but in the real world, where real men rape real women, where real fathers rape real children, where the real activities of our culture are destroying the real world, who are the real beneficiaries? "Like successful Chicago gangsters," Richard Dawkins has written, "our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior." How pathetic this is, that in an attempt to rationalize our actions, we have at last given up claims that our destructive, irrational, behavior is even in our best interests as human beings, and have sunk to redefining our very selves as nothing more than "survival machines," "lumbering robots" driven to insane action by the "selfish" desires of our genetic material. The Christian hatred of the body merges here with Cartesian solipsism to conjure ourselves entirely out of subjective existence.

It is time to return to the real world. If my brothers were to die, I would feel pain and loss: they are a part of me as surely as my hands, my fingers, or the hours of my life. If my mother were to die, or my sisters, I would feel pain. Each of my friends is a part of me, connected by bonds at least as strong, though not so visible, as skin.

I love the land where I live, the trees—the coyote tree, the grandfather ponderosa, and others—the dogs, cats, birds, coyotes, spiders, ticks, even the mice. How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons pressed into service by gangsterish genes? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable—physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially—to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

The boundaries of the concentration camp are not made up of landmines and electrified wire. There are no guards posted to shoot us if we stray. We need not take the whip from the hands of the guards, nor use it to strike those beneath us. It's all much simpler than that. We need only walk away, and re-enter the world in all its unity.

No one emerges from trauma unscarred. Having been severely traumatized, it becomes the work of at least a lifetime to denormalize the trauma—-to recognize it for the aberration it is—and to begin to reinhabit your body, your senses, your mind, to reinhabit relationships, to reinhabit a world you perceive as having betrayed you.

Only recently have I learned that not everyone awakens in the night to listen for the sound of the door creaking open, or at four in the morning stares hard into the darkness of a room intentionally blackened, searching for the black-on-black of a silhouette. Throughout my twenties, I checked the room each night, and though I never found anyone hiding under the bed, or in the closet, I continued to enact the fear I learned as a child. Even now I often put my clothes hamper in front of the door, not expecting it to stop anyone, but instead mechanically manifesting my childhood prayer:
Do not let him come for me when I sleep. Do not let him catch me unready. Let me be awake always, so when he comes, I can go away.
A few nights ago I dreamed my father was raping me, saying again and again as he interminably came, "I am going to make you like me. I am going to make you normal."

I have my poison; you have yours.
Name it. Walk away from
it. But it's terrifying. There are landmines. I can see them, having grown up with them. There is barbed wire. I do not like this concentration camp, but I believe the world is no different.

....

Having passed through trauma, we have a choice we must revisit for the rest of our lives: attempt to denormalize the trauma, or try to make the trauma feel normal. If the barriers are too frightening, the landmines too real, we can try to rationalize, to normalize what happened to us. This also helps rationalize what we're doing to others. This process of normalizing is central to the fabrication of claims to virtue. It is also central to the way Western science and religion manifest themselves.

Examples of this normalization are as near as todays paper. A local couple is on trial for animal abuse. After receiving complaints for a number of years, sheriffs raided their puppy mill. The officers found a dog with exposed bone where a fractured jaw had healed, several with protruding intestines, and several more with neck lacerations from constricting collars. There was one mother trying to feed nearly forty puppies. Thirty-five of the adult dogs had to be killed. The couples defense in court? They owned those dogs. They cited Psalms 8: "Thou madest him [man] to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all
things
under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea,
and whatsoever
passes through the paths of the seas." The emphasis—that beasts of the field are
things
—is in the original.

The judge evidently had no choice but to find them guilty of some of the charges. He then delivered an attack which the newspaper called blistering. He did not attack the defendants but instead "overzealous animal rights activists" who called for justice in the first place.

What do you do, how tired do you get, when each day you struggle against an entire culture based on the normalization of trauma-inducing behavior? There is no sanctuary.

Last winter, ice came in a rain that froze the instant it touched any solid surface. Then more rain, more ice, until the night shone, every blade of grass, every needle on every pine tree a prism for the moonlight that eventually poked through the clouds.