A Language Older Than Words (36 page)

There is an image that has stuck in my mind since I first encountered it in a book many years ago. Thousands of Jews, fresh from the Warsaw Ghetto, all stand or sit in a large arena, like a courtyard or stadium. They are led off in groups of five or so. The movement of each group down a corridor leads quickly to a new round of rifle fire from the direction of their disappearance. Why don't the remaining people flee? To try to understand, I've turned the question back on myself: staring straight into the
maw of global ecological collapse, why do we follow along, equally
trusting, equally complacent, down a corridor we know has only one exit, an exit we anticipate all too well? In a less dramatic though no less inevitable manner, why do we walk down paths of wage labor, toiling away our lives for some chimerical goal of fiscal sufficiency? I remember speaking with my students about the doomed Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, and asking why they thought these people acted, or failed to act, as they did. One of my students gave an insightful answer: "Undoubtedly some were in denial until the end, but I'm sure others realized that even when your external choices have been removed, you at least can still act with dignity." So the mother facing the machine gun holds tight to her child's shoulder, feels one last time the texture of her skin, and in that moment attempts to convey to her daughter an entire lifetime's worth of love. Is that a solution? Not in the larger sense of stopping the Nazis. But it is a beautifully and
lovingly adaptive response arising directly out of the circumstances
faced by the doomed woman and her family.

Perhaps that explains the behavior of my friend Dave as well. He cannot escape his economic conditions, but these conditions do not disallow a love for his family that gets him through each day. He can hold them, and love them, as meanwhile slip away the hours of his life. The same is undoubtedly true from his wife's perspective.

Maybe this is it, I thought: instead of creating a revolution, rushing and overpowering our armed guards—both tangible and internalized—we adapt as best we can, put our heads down, get through the day.

Then I had another thought: perhaps the problem is that those of us striving for egalitarianism, or just trying to make a
f
ine, noble, and happy life, tire of this struggle more quickly than those whose wounds for whatever reason give them a superhuman stamina in their indomitable quest to control and destroy. Perhaps revolutions fail because those in power feel more fear than we feel love. Or perhaps because we ourselves feel more fear than love. I don't like to think this, but evidence suggests it may be at least partly true.

I think also of something George often replies when I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many people earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other obviously destructive jobs:
Sixty days,
he says. That's how long it takes before people begin to die of starvation.
Sixty days.
Dave can't quit his job because in sixty days his children will die. No longer can Dave kill and eat Eskimo curlews from a flock that one day may have passed directly over the spot where now he lives. No longer do most of us—myself included—have the skills to raise or gather our own food. We are members of only the third or fourth generation in the history of humankind who have not known how to build our own shelters. I say I want a revolution, and that I want to "shut down the machine," but until we find a new equilibrium, how are we going to eat? Sixty days: those two short words, those two altogether too short months, are a primary reason most of us do not rebel. We still have too much to lose.

While all of these are clearly contributing factors to the inevitable failures of revolutions, and also failures to revolt, I recently came across some analysis that finally makes clear the reason for the lack of success. It's not good news. Just as the problems with our schooling are not psychological—only requiring we find better teachers—so too do we not simply need to find better revolutionaries. The problems inhere in the structure and functioning of our society.

The analysis came from a book entitled
Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation,
by Karl Kautsky. One of the groups Kautsky describes is the Taborites, a group of communists who were never conquered externally, but whose experiment devolved nonetheless into a pseudo-community as selfish, militaristic, and intolerant as surrounding city-states. This selfishness, militarism, and intolerance extended, to provide one example among many, to the extermination of the Adamites, a sect more communistic than they ("Those whom the sword had spared, the fire consumed," comments Kautsky). "The fate of Tabor is of the greatest interest," Kautsky writes, "for it shows what would have been the outcome of the Münzer movement . .. and of the Anabaptist movement ... if they had remained unconquered." He follows this with a few sentences I disagree with, and then says, "While the needs of the poor engendered the struggle for communism, those of production demanded the existence of private proprietorship."

There you have it. The needs of mass production—a tunneling of resources toward producers—is in opposition to the needs of the community—a siphoning of resources toward the poor. In one sentence the failure of egalitarian dreams. So long as we value production over relationship, and in fact over life, so long shall we follow our current path of ever-increasing immiseration for the ever-increasing majority.

Recall that the primary feature Ruth Benedict observed as leading to a "good" culture, one that is peaceful, and one in which the members are almost invariably "nice," is that members of these cultures have set up a "siphon system" to shuttle wealth from rich to poor. This "siphon system" is antithetical to the primacy of private (from the same root as
deprive,
remember) property. Even those revolutions claiming to dispose of private property—Marxist revolutions, for example, which in any case do not even purport to dispose of rigid hierarchy—continue in this insoluble contradiction between the needs of mass production and the needs of human beings.

It really is very simple. What you value is what you create. This is true whether we speak of motorcycles, interstate highways, nuclear power plants, napalm, and indoor sports arenas, or harmonious familial and communal relationships and harmonious relationships between ourselves and our nonhuman neighbors. The inverse is true as well: by looking at what we or anyone else creates, we can determine much more accurately than with words alone what is deemed valuable.

By not questioning the primacy of production, and therefore the valuing of private property over (human and nonhuman) relationships, most revolutionaries guarantee their revolutions won't change fundamental power structures. For it doesn't matter whether capitalists, the Supreme Soviet, proletariats, the Church, or intellectuals control the means of production, the truth is that this group—fill in the blank—then controls the means of production. The property is just as private whether the owners claim to be capitalists, communists, "horny-handed workers," or anarchists. Wealth funnels toward the producers and away from the community as a whole. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

If we wish to do away with bosses, we need to do away with the primacy of production. We need to learn from egalitarian religious and especially extant indigenous groups that the emphasis of our society must be on process: not on the creation of
things
and the accumulation of monetary or political power, but on the acknowledgment and maintenance of relationships, on both personal and grand scales.

How a group that has as its foundation the maintenance of relationships can stand up in direct conflict to a group based on production is a question to which I don't yet have an answer. It is, however, a question that needs to be asked, and answered, and soon.

It should be apparent that what plays out in intrahuman relationships plays out more broadly in our relationships with the rest of the world. A culture that values production over life values the wrong thing, because it will produce
things
at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise. And it will destroy its ecosystemic base. To argue over whether the Trilateral Commission, Weyerhaeuser, Bill Gates and Microsoft, the Bolsheviks, or a small band of Maoists should control production as the world burns seems a wee bit absurd, and more than a little pathetic.

I'm not saying that Dave's condition as a wage slave is the same as the condition of a woman about to be shot by a Nazi police officer. Nor am I saying that to grow up in a violent household is the same as to be murdered and mutilated by a United States Cavalry trooper. Nor am I saying that the Holocaust is the same as the destruction of indigenous peoples, nor am I saying that clearcuts are the same as rape. To make any of these claims would be absurd. Underlying the different forms of coercion is a unifying factor: Silence. The necessity of silencing victims before, during, and after exploitation or annihilation, and the necessity at these same times of silencing one's own conscience and one's conscious awareness of relationship is undeniable. These radically different atrocities share mechanisms of silencing; science, for example, has been used as efficiently to silence women as it has Jews as it has trees as it has rocks as it has children, chimpanzees, the elderly, our dreams, our common sense, and our sense of the sacrality of community. The same can be said for the uses of our religion, economics, politics, and so on. The perpetrators of these atrocities share a deeply unifying belief in their own separateness and superiority, and a tightly rationalized belief in the rightness of their actions. The perpetrators share a deep fear of interconnection and of the unpredictability of a life that may end in death tomorrow, or not for a hundred years, but one that will nonetheless end.

The psychologist Erich Fromm changed Descartes' dictum from "I think, therefore I am," to "I affect, therefore I am." If Gilgamish can cut down a forest, if he can make a name for himself, he has affected the world around him. If Hitler can "purify" the Aryan "race," if he can become the progenitor of a thousand-year Reich, he has, too. If my father can make my teenage sister wet her pants from fear and pain, or if he can make me take his penis against my skin—and more broadly if he can destroy our souls . . . you get the picture. Frederick Weyerhaeuser (acting now through the unliving yet immortal corporate proxy that bears his name) deforested first the Midwest, then the Northwest, and now wants the world. Fearful of life, the perpetrators forget that one can affect another with love, by allowing another's life to unfold according to its own nature and desires and fate, and by giving to the other what it needs to unfold. One can affect another by merely being present and listening intently to that other. All of this is true whether we speak of forests, children, rocks, rivers, stars, and wolverines, or races, cultures, and communities of human beings.

In the same speech where he said there are only two races— the decent and the indecent—Viktor Frankl also said, "Every
nation is capable [of the] Holocaust." As we have seen, this is true.

My father is not Hitler, he is not the head of Weyerhaeuser, nor is he Gilgamish. But to deny they have anything in common is to refuse to see. To insist that each of these perpetrators is somehow an aberration—to try to remove each individually from the cultural context that creates them all—is to not merely facilitate but to make inevitable the continuation of their atrocities. It is to believe, even as we walk down the corridor toward the sputtering sound of rifles, that miraculously, our turn will never come.

I feel conflicted about my newfound understanding of the flaws of historical revolutions. On one hand it's important to understand the past, so we can at least try not to repeat mistakes. On the other, I'm not sure how understanding what's wrong will help us determine what's right.

In my mind, I keep seeing the face of my high school friend Jon—now an avid pursuer of ever-larger American Dreams— and I keep hearing his voice in my head, sharply teasing, "So, the Russian Revolution was a scam? Our Founding Fathers were hypocrites? Stop the presses! Anybody who doesn't understand that revolutions are like revolving doors, where one boss steps in when another steps out, shouldn't be talking about revolutions. You've got to get what you can in the meantime. Make yourself comfortable."

His voice continues, "How does your analysis help? Instead of new bosses taking over production, you want to stop production altogether? Does the word
starvation
mean anything to you? And what do you think would happen if you walked into an Eagle Hardware Store—motto:
More of Everything
—and announced you wanted the customers, never mind the owners, to give up their jet skis and jacuzzis, their three hundred types of track lighting and economy-size bags of Weed 'n Feed? Those people would rip you limb from limb, and they'd feel good about it."

He's right. But his voice—as I imagine it—has more to tell: "If, as you say, our religion, philosophy, science, economics, politics, and so on are manifestations of cultural desire, and if"—the voice hesitates, then spits the next words—
"as you say,
that means these fields have as their purpose the rationalization of exploitation, what makes you think we could expect anything different from a revolution that comes from this same culture?"

"Shit," I say out loud.

"Checkmate," the voice replies.

Today I read in the newspaper that across the globe, sea turtles are dying from massive tumors afflicting up to 90 percent of some populations. The tumors, noncancerous growths called fibropapillomas, are killing turtles much faster than turtles can reproduce. The article reports: "The tumors themselves don't kill as much as they smother. Eyes and noses get covered. Lungs and the heart are constricted by the tumors on the inside." Tumors have been seen on turtles from Brazil to Florida, from Hawaii to Indonesia, and can grow to be at least half the size of the turtle him- or herself. The best guess as to the specific cause is fertilizer or manure runoff from factory farms. Changes in water temperature may also be affecting the creatures' ability to ward off viruses.