Dysfunctional Culture
by Jason GodeskyI feel sorry for George Bush. It can’t be easy to grow up in the shadow of a president—particularly when your mother is one of the most vile bitches in American history. Barbara’s iconic image as “America’s grandmother” hid the reality of how deeply dysfunctional one of the United States’ most powerful dynasties truly is. “Tricky Dick” Nixon, no gentle soul himself, said of her when they first met: “she knows how to hate.” In the Bush household, mother’s love was commensurate with advancement of dynastic ambitions, so for the black sheep that bore his father’s name, the first several decades of life were a spiral of failure, leading to dysfunctional family relations, leading to deeper failure.
Psychologist Oliver James took a fascinating look at the psychology of the Bush dynasty.
Peter Neumann, an Andover roommate, recalls that, “He idolised his father, he was going to be just like his dad.” At Yale, a friend remembered a “deep respect” for his father and when he later set up in the oil business, another friend said, “He was focused to prove himself to his dad.”
On the other hand, deep down, Bush had a profound loathing for this perfect model of American citizenship whose very success made the son feel a failure. Rebelliousness was an unconscious attack on him and a desperate attempt to carve out something of his own. Far from paternal emulation, Bush described his goal at school as “to instil a sense of frivolity”. Contemporaries at Yale say he was like the John Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled funseeker.
He was aggressively anti-intellectual and hostile to east-coast preppy types like his father, sometimes cruelly so. On one occasion he walked up to a matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, “So, what’s sex like after 50, anyway?”
A direct and loutish challenge to his father’s posh sensibility came aged 25, after he had drunkenly crashed a car. “I hear you’re looking for me,” he sneered at his father, “do you want to go mano y mano, right here?”
Yet, while his father’s shadow was the context of George’s youth, it was his mother who salted the wounds and truly molded the president into the man he is today. It’s been said that Bush’s tortured speech is a result of his mother’s command that he never use the same word twice—even when it would make obvious sense to do so.
Barbara Bush is described by her closest intimates as prone to “withering stares” and “sharply crystalline” retorts. She is also extremely tough. When he was seven, Bush’s younger sister, Robin, died of leukaemia and several independent witnesses say he was very upset by this loss. Barbara claims its effect was exaggerated but nobody could accuse her of overreacting: the day after the funeral, she and her husband were on the golf course.
She was the main authority-figure in the home. Jeb describes it as having been, “A kind of matriarchy… when we were growing up, dad wasn’t at home. Mom was the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline.” A childhood friend recalls that,”She was the one who instilled fear”, while Bush put it like this: “Every mother has her own style. Mine was a little like an army drill sergeant’s… my mother’s always been a very outspoken person who vents very well - she’ll just let rip if she’s got something on her mind.” According to his uncle, the “letting rip” often included slaps and hits. Countless studies show that boys with such mothers are at much higher risk of becoming wild, alcoholic or antisocial.
On top of that, Barbara added substantially to the pressure from his father to be a high achiever by creating a highly competitive family culture. All the children’s games, be they tiddlywinks or baseball, were intensely competitive - an actual “family league table” was kept of performance in various pursuits. At least this prepared him for life at Andover, where emotional literacy was definitely not part of the curriculum. Soon after arriving, he was asked to write an essay on a soul-stirring experience in his life to date and he chose the death of his sister. His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed “tears” once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote “the lacerates ran down my cheeks”. The essay received a fail grade, accompanied by derogatory comments such as “disgraceful”.
This incident may be an insight into Bush’s strange tendency to find the wrong words in making public pronouncements. “Is our children learning?” he once famously asked. On responding to critics of his intellect he claimed that they had “misunderestimated” him. Perhaps these verbal faux-pas are a barely unconscious way of winding up his bullying mother and waving two fingers at his cultured father’s sensibility.
This perspective makes Bush a pitiable figure. According to the PBS documentary The Dark Side, he was unconvinced about the case for WMD’s in Iraq; a friend of the president said on the issue of gay marriage, “I don’t think he gives a shit about it.” Yet he’s supported brutal, totalitarian policies at the behest of his advisors. Before his election, Bush couldn’t do anything right. Since then, he’s been obsessed with outdoing his father.
Of course, it’s well known that many of history’s worst dictators were the victims of child abuse. Saddam Hussein was abused by his uncle, and gang raped as a child. Stalin’s father was a drunk who regularly beat his wife and children. Hitler’s famed art career was a rebellion against his father’s wish for him to follow him as a customs official. It’s easy to see how the victim of child abuse can become a tyrant: the deep-seated sense of helplessness can grow into an overwhelming need for total control, the control that might help stop them from being hurt again.
The interesting question, of course, is less what motivates the dictator, than what it is that we, as a people, see of ourselves in them. Even if Democrats are right that Bush “stole” the election, we still must admit that nearly half of the United States’ voting population supported Bush. The Onion may have meant it as a joke, but humor is impossible without a core of truth.
“In its adulthood, the U.S. displays all the classic tendencies of a nation that was repeatedly mistreated in its infancy—difficulty forming lasting foreign relationships, viewing everyone as a potential enemy, and employing a pattern of assault and intimidation to assert its power,” said Dr. Howard Drexel, the report’s lead author. “Because of trust issues stemming from the abuse, America has become withdrawn, has not made an ally in years, and often resents the few nations that are willing to lend support—most countries outgrow this kind of behavior after 230 years.”
Of course, colonialism was a horribly exploitative system, and the American population was made up of England’s undesirables—from unwanted cults like the Puritans or the Quakers, to the unattached, single men who so often cause society trouble at more southerly colonies. Is the United States an abused child on a national scale? Is that why so many of us identify with George Bush?
A few years back, George Lakoff released a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant!, a guidebook for how to get Democrats elected again that tore through blue America like a wildfire and inspired liberals everywhere to not change anything, lose the presidential election, and wonder why they kept failing. Lakoff’s primary argument was that conservatives wanted a “stern father” in a leader, whereas liberals wanted a “nurturing mother.” One lone voice of reason in the Amazon.com reviews asked if it had ever occurred to anyone that perhaps Americans were grown men and women who didn’t need parents to tell them what to do—either stern or nurturing ones.
Of course, it’s natural to use the family as a metaphor for society. The Roman emperor predicated his power on his position as the Pater Patriae of the Roman people, a Pater familias on the imperial scale. Even today, we speak of George Washington as the “father of our country,” and describe our Civil War as a conflict “of brother against brother.” We speak of a “motherland” (or, in German-speaking countries, “Fatherland”). We seem to naturally gravitate towards metaphors of family whenever we try to describe the body politic.
But if the state is a family, then it is a deeply dysfunctional one. Derrick Jensen, himself a survivor of his father’s abuse, has been using that metaphor for years now. In his writings, he often compares the crimes of civilization against humanity to the crimes his father committed against him.
One particular aspect of living with abuse—whether the abuser is a spouse, a parent, or a culture—is a victim’s identification with his or her abuser. The most common misconception we come up against is that art, music, philosophy, religion, trade, and science are all abundant in civilized cultures and lacking in primitive cultures. Likewise, the same people tend to believe that things exclusive to civilized cultures and absent in tribal societies—like war, disease, famine, inequality, and strict hierarchy—abound in primitive tribes. The fact that every last bit of anthropological evidence completely contradicts that misconception doesn’t matter. So long as we’re prevented from actually experiencing tribal life for ourselves, we’re kept happily complicit in our own oppression. As Derrick Jensen put it:
One of the most common and necessary steps taken by an abuser in order to control a victim is to monopolize the victim’s perception. That is one reason abusers cut off victims from family and friends: so that in time victims will have no standard other than the abusers’ by which to judge the abusers’ worldviews and behavior. Behavior that would otherwise seem extraordinarily bizarre (How crazy is it to rape one’s own child? How crazy is it to toxify the air you breathe?) can then become in the victim’s mind (and even more sadly, heart) normalized. No outside influence must be allowed to break the spell. If the abuser is able to mediate all information that reaches the victim, the victim will no longer be able to conceptualize that there is any other way to be. At this point the abuser will have achieved more or less total control.
We should note not only our isolation from other cultures, what Daniel Quinn called the “Great Forgetting,” but also our growing isolation from one another.
This is, of course, the point we have reached as a culture. Civilization has achieved a completely unprecedented and nearly perfect monopolization of our perception, at least for those of us in the industrialized world. Nearly all of our sensory input is mediated by our fellow civilized. I’m typing these words sitting in a manufactured chair staring at a manufactured computer screen, listening to the hum of a manufactured computer fan. To my left are manufactured shelves of manufactured books, written by human beings. Civilized, literate human beings, who write in English (languages, many of them indigenous, are being destroyed as quickly as all other forms of diversity, and to as disastrous an effect). To my right a window leads to the darkened outside and reflects back to me my uncombed dark hair surrounding the blur of my own face. I’m wearing mass-produced clothes, and mass-produced slippers. I do, however, have a cat on my lap. All sensory inputs save the cat originate in civilized humans, and even the cat is domesticated.
This is precisely the problem that David Abram illustrates in Spell of the Sensuous, something we’ve discussed a great deal here recently. Jensen goes on to press Abram’s point even more explicitly—but now in terms of abuse:
Stop. Think about it. Every sensation I have comes from one source: civilization. When you finish this paragraph, put down the magazine for a few moments, and check out your own surroundings. What can you see, hear, smell, feel, taste that does not originate in or is mediated by civilized human beings? Frogs singing on a Sounds of Nature CD don’t count.
This is all very strange. Stranger still - and extraordinarily revealing of the degree to which we’ve not only accepted this artificially imposed isolation, but have actually turned our insanity into a perceived good - is the way we’ve made a fetish and religion (and science, for that matter, and business) of attempting to define ourselves as separate from - even in opposition to - the rest of nature. Civilization isolates all of us, ideologically and physically, from the source of all life. We do not believe trees have anything to say to us, nor stars, nor coyotes, nor even our dreams. We have been convinced that the world is silent save for civilized humans.
Perhaps even more importantly, Jensen highlights how abusers—like civilization—co-opts us and makes us complicit in our own abuse. We perpetuate the abuse, just as victims of child abuse so often become abusers; so do we inevitably raise our children in the same cultures we found so wanting in our idealistic youth.
Force is an expensive and inefficient way to exploit. This is as true on the grand social level as it is on the familial. From the perspective of those in power, it’s more desirable to get those you exploit to participate in their own victimization.
One way this can happen is through mystification, where an exploiter convinces victims that the violence is their fault. The abusive father, for example, might tell his children he would not have hit them had they sufficiently cleaned the dishes. This serves the function of causing the children to focus on cleaning the dishes instead of attending to the inexcusable violence of their father. Perhaps more importantly, it convinces them that if they can only be good enough at reading and responding to their abuser’s everchanging wants, they might not get beaten. The question as it relates to free will becomes: if they clean the dishes obsessively and perform every other obeisance, all without him beating them anymore, are they then doing these of their own free will?
Aren’t we convinced that only the guilty are put in jail? Only terrorists are in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about?
Aside from apologizing for the abuse (civilization hits me because it loves me), what are the other effects of abuse, in individual humans? Jennifer Atieno Fisher explains, and I sardonically turn various words and phrases into links:
First recorded (and later denied) by Freud, the aftereffects of exposure to severe abuse were rediscovered and legitimized in studies of “shell-shocked” war veterans. Particularly when people are traumatized in early life, the effects of trauma interfere with all types of development. Intelligence is occluded as persistent learning and concentration deficits develop. Severe symptoms, frequently misdiagnosed, include dissociation, multiple personalities, learned helplessness, addiction to danger, and painful “body memories.” Effects are contagious to surrounding systems and future generations. Many survivors identify with the aggressor and become victimizers themselves.
Survivors may cope by developing syndromes that later prove maladaptive. They may become addicted to their own stress responses, compulsively exposing themselves to further traumatization. Inexplicable secondary symptoms may add to learned helplessness and shame. Traumatized people frequently experience unworthiness and personal responsibility for pain. The traumatized mind loses necessary faith in the benevolence and safety of our world.
Is that all there is? Are we simply damned to an overpopulated, abusive “family” of civilization and the state, fuelled by deep-seated trauma?
For over 99% of our species’ history, family was society. A tribe is nothing more than a large, tight-knit extended family. Most people are too fixated on the concept of the lonely, dirty, barbaric savage to realize that, and that’s probably why they have no problem imagining tribes having hierarchy and leaders. Would you come to a family gathering, lock up all the food, and declare yourself emperor? Of course not! Nor would that ridiculous thought occur to someone who had been raised in a tribal society. As the College of Mythic Cartography put it so well:
Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions…instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land.
This is an important and essential point. Civilization is an enormous, dysfunctional family, but we weren’t always so dysfunctional—and that means we don’t need to remain this way. Lisa Rayner helps us see a bridge in permaculture, from the social trauma of civilization as well as the ecological trauma we’ve caused along the way. In “Ecological Collapse, Trauma Theory and Permaculture,” she shows us how deeply our collective psyche is bound to the ecology we belong to.
A brief comparison of the process of healing from PTSD and the process of healing from ecological/social collapse demonstrates that they are remarkably similar. The principles of trauma therapy and the principles of permaculture design share the same basic outline.
The trauma may be terrible, but it is not so terrible that it cannot be healed. It is important for us to understand what rewilding is: a healing of the earth, and a healing of the human spirit, from the trauma of civilization. The path lies in ending the cycle of domination and hierarchy, and the fostering of healthy families—the wandering free families.
Ted Kennedy and his brothers grew up the same way from what I have read.
That’s why these families are on top. That’s what it takes to rule.
The thing I am struggling with is that it would take worse monsters to dismantle civilization.
The loving nurturing tribes would have to be created later in the aftermath.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 12:04 AM
I couldn’t disagree more. We need those tribes now, in order to survive when this dysfunctional clusterfuck finally finishes itself off. If we wait till the aftermath, then who’s going to get that far?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 September 2006 @ 12:22 AM
We don’t disagree. Check out my blog. I just didn’t state it clearly enough. I agree the tribes need to come first. That is the problem with this whole idea of destroying civilization before rewilding.
I am not struggling with how can I become a monster, I am struggling with how people can’t see that it would take people becoming monsters to bring the whole thing down.
Jensen uses imagery like a mother moose or grizzly, but the picture I see is a huge violent siege. If it woukld ever even get off the ground.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 1:16 AM
A mistake that we tend to make when speaking of abuse is to only think about it in its very obvious and dramatic forms. Then, if none of these has happened to us; if, say, we haven’t been punched by a parent, or even yelled at, we think the discussion doesn’t apply directly to us. A widespread form of abuse that I’ll bet everyone has suffered from is the denial of our true selves by (usually) our parents. This takes place invisibly, every day. An example is like this: “Oh don’t cry, sweetie, it’s just a broken toy.” Or like this: “It’s a sad occasion, but you must be brave.” In physical abuse, the bruises and broken bones can heal quickly. What imprisons the child for decades after the bones have healed (until death, even) is the emotional need to bury the true self which cries when it is appropriate to cry. This allows the child, literally, to survive. This same damaging imprisonment is effected with seemingly good parenting (”Oh don’t cry, sweetie.”–This response to a crying child seems so right!)
If we don’t think the discussion applies directly to us, then we can think about it as “other” and its actual immediacy and pertinence to our lives loses the chance to affect us in really healthy ways (like getting us off our butts to meet like-minded people, or to start learning primitive skills, or just to wake up to the fact that we civilized humans have once again put a hurt child into power.) One of the biggest secrets in civilization today is the fact that most of us are living life by making educated guesses at acceptability instead of living life as our true selves, even many of us who are otherwise completely unorthodox.
This concept really deserves more than my little blog comment here, but I really resonated with this post, so what the heck. Alice Miller’s book The Drama of the Gifted Child (which has an unfortunate title because it is not about “smart” or “precocious” children) explains it in book length, and my own blog post My Dropping Out Story gives it a post-length treatment.
Comment by casemeau — 27 September 2006 @ 4:13 AM
I love your blog, Tim, but I think you’re flat out wrong on this. No violent campaign will ever do anything but make civilization stronger. It would take a monster to follow the plans like Jensen’s laid out, but those plans won’t take civilization down—they will make it stronger. If you really want to talk about bringing civilization down, let’s talk about what does that effectively. You’ve got to attack people’s faith in the system, get them to stop investing in complexity. There’s only so much of that you can do on your own, but by highlighting the collapse happening around us, you not only encourage people to start looking beyond civilization, you also accelerate collapse by eroding “investors’ confidence” in complexity.
I disagree with the use of the term “abuse” to cover something like that. The fact of the matter is, even in a tribal society, you have to know when it’s OK to express yourself, and when you need some self-control. If you accept that, then the rest of this is a sliding scale.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 September 2006 @ 10:19 AM
I don’t mean to be excessively obtuse, but who’s Tim and where’s the support for a violent campaign coming from? (Aside from Jensen, naturally…)
Comment by jhereg — 27 September 2006 @ 11:36 AM
Tim’s the Free Range Organic Human, and if you haven’t been following his blog lately, firstly, you should because it’s awesome, but secondly, he had some thoughts on violent insurrection lately, and yes, Derrick Jensen, too.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 September 2006 @ 11:49 AM
Maybe he called me “Tim” by accident instead of Ted.
I don’t think there is widespread support for violent insurrection. But its a discussion going around in green anarchist circles.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 11:51 AM
re: violence & monsters
If you read the myths, you learn quickly that what is most effective against an unstoppable monster is ‘trickery’ — attacking it from an angle it does not expect and / or cannot compensate for. While this may involve violence, it certainly is not as simple as just destroying something. Such tactics against ‘monsters’ never work.
The bottom line is you don’t have to become a monster to take down civilization. You have to become the “Other”, the Trickster.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 September 2006 @ 11:52 AM
Right, you beat me to it.
Thanks
I don’t want to get too off topic, but I brought it up here because of the Derrick Jensen quotes.
These whole idea of building nurturing tribes of people is really important I think. First of all because by being so alienated from each other and close personal ties people are easier to control, they are more fearful.
To be a violent revolutionary, requires a person with no ties to anyone except the idea of revolution.
So these are opposite forces.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 11:56 AM
Bill,
I think it would take a trickster to build a rhizome community that escapes notice of hierarchies and eventually supplants them.
Hiding out in the open, things like that. This is all stuff I consider “coyote medicine”.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 12:01 PM
I thinkit would serve us well to find a spiritual outlet for all of this anger towards the “opporesor”
how can a truly changed mind truly have an opporessor other than oneself?
Changing one’s mind about where your food comes from and implementing the plan throws the bulk of opporesion off of you, after that, it’s a legal battle of paying taxes and staying in good favor of whatever nation you are a citizen (for the time being).
I really liked your humanizing of GWB, Jason, it is a helpful thing to understand, expecially when the blame game commences.
Comment by TonyZ — 27 September 2006 @ 12:22 PM
I love it when you guys post on social issues, primitivism, societal forms, etc. but your posts on politics are generally just way outside the strengths and focus of this blog.
If I want to read about Bush Dynasty issues, etc. there are lots of left-wing blogs or political commentary blogs for that. You should stick to your blog’s strengths, which are not revolving on current politics.
Comment by Al — 27 September 2006 @ 12:29 PM
Errr … yes.
I’m well aware; that’s why I spent so much time writing “On Violence,” on all the reasons why this needs to be stopped.
Sing it, brutha! What I like about Jensen is the sense of urgency he brings to the crisis. Seeing it in terms of war can be helpful for keeping the crisis in its proper perspective, but as far as an actual plan to wage that war, I find his suggestions to be a little bit insane.
Indeed. I think the idea of violent revolution plays into the civilized mindset. I think we need to take more of a view of dysfunctional vs. healthy families. You don’t wage a war to wipe out dysfunctional families; that’s the kind of thing that abused children (like GWB) come up with. Rather, you begin a process of healing, you create a healthy family. That means tribalism, rewilding, tracking, permaculture, all of that helps heal the trauma civilization has inflicted on our land, and on our relations. A war isn’t going to accomplish that; a war just creates more trauma to heal. It’s not a matter of pacifism; it’s a matter of using an effective strategy. As I wrote at the end of my article on violence, “This is a war that we cannot afford to lose. Are we going to lose it for so petty a reason, that we’re so civilized that we can’t think of a more effective way of waging it than blowing things up?”
And I think that’s a much more effective means of tearing down civilization than some sophmoric campaign to blow up its dams.
A fine example of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Psycho-spiritual fulfillment can only follow when you have an equitable way of putting food in your belly, just like all oppression must begin at the food supply.
Thanks. Of course, no one’s a villain in his own mind, so if we’re not trying to understand where our villains are coming from, what are we doing besides a big circle jerk of how good we are for not being the villain?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 September 2006 @ 12:37 PM
Current politics is how these social issues crop up in our world. Notice, GWB’s own family history is just a microcosm of the much larger social system. When we write about politics, it’s usually in this vein: current politics as recent manifestations of much larger processes. In this case, the nested systems of abuse from the personal life of the “leader of the free world,” up to civilization itself is, I think, noteworthy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 September 2006 @ 12:39 PM
I really enjoy the imagery of the outsider, the trickster, as defeating an enemy.
Long have I walked this path.
For anyone attached to particular outcomes, this isn’t your path.
For people who have many people expecting great things from you, this isn’t your path.
But if you want to create change, uproot stagnation, then the Path of the Coyote might me for you.
—-
I was hiking in the woods one day when I decided to seperate myself from the group and head up a steep, steep hill (think the front side of Seneca Rocks). I climbed for the freedom of climbing, and for some reason I kept saying to myself ko-yo-tay. I realized that I was playing some silly trick on myself, climbing this intense path.
I sat down on a ledge two thrids upand I realize I jsut plopped myself down into a coyote den! How about that? It was past dusk, and I was kind of nervous.
That’s when so many things I wanted to know was revealed, and the thing that’s relevant to this post was how crazy it was to associate or attempt to associate with other species, like, in a deep way, not so much physically-mechanically…
Only the insane talk to plants and animals. But those that do have a window to infinity, the real Pandora’s Box.
Becuase once life is aware of infinity, the universe, and consciousness, there is no turning back.
We can’t go back to being “just primates” any more than our housecat can go back to being a lynx, ocelot, or whatever they used to be.
We’re conditioned to think of ourselves so radically different, we’re able to mentally weak so many masks, we have none of our own.
And there go the morons, off to fight for their purity, a purity that didn’t exist outside of the earth and could never possibly re-exist.
And so, those in the know can only make others trip on themselves so that they might catch a glimpse of their true face ont he way down.
Comment by TonyZ — 27 September 2006 @ 4:50 PM
I meant to say wear the masks, not weak the masks.
oh and antoher thing, not to say “those in the know” have something others don’t, save possibly for expanded faculties of perception
Comment by TonyZ — 27 September 2006 @ 4:53 PM
Tony that was awesome! I love that kind of stuff.
I have coyote neighbor. He is an urban coyote living in Madison, WI in a wheat feild owned by Catholic nuns believe it or not.
Think of the symbolism there. The wild trickster living inside three symbols of civilization and getting fat while remaining completely wild.
It takes a trickster to pull that off.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 27 September 2006 @ 5:54 PM
Personally, I don’t want to see the whole thing come down. At least not in the sense of the entire collapse of civilization.
Sure, I would very much like to see a world with sustainable steady state populations, renewable energy sources, and sustainable agriculture. I’d love to live in a nurtering culture, one that is environmentally benign. But to be digging for roots with the other fifty members of my tribe, no thanks.
I [i]enjoy[/] much that civilization offers me - very much so. What it offers me, in real terms, is a vast cornucopia of thought, some of it manifest into the physical world in the shape of goods and services, and much of it housed in the great library of accumulated human knowledge.
Daniel Quinn was quoted above saying: “We have been convinced that the world is silent save for civilized humans.” but didn’t civilization result from listening to the world, recording what it says, and then implementing what we have learned? Observation first, then exploitation.
I enjoy feasting on the amazing product of human thought and ingenuity, be it dining at restaurants, listening to music, - both live and recorded - reading books, viewing films, and interacting with art.
I also enjoy attempting to create those things myself.
Even mundane things like my ability to walk into a hardware store and buy a nut, knowing that it will mate perfectly with a previously acquired bolt, fills me with vast awe.
Yes, there is much that is dysfunctional in civilization. I don’t know if we can reach a place beyond the dysfunction. I’m pessimistic that we won’t, at least not before the complete impoverishment of nature at large.
If that is the case, it is nature’s error, not our own.
Nature will continue. Life will re-emerge in stunning blooms of future evolutionary iterations. Species will arise and extinctions will extinguish, and at some point, three billion years from now perhaps, our sun will supernova. The end.
But for all the dystopia of modernity. I dig tennis shoes, i-pods, electric guitars, books, jeans, hot showers, photographs.
I don’t care to hunt and gather with the same few hundred people for the entirety of my life, listening to the same stories from the same mouths as I delouse my spouse.
Give me Paris, not New Guinea.
Comment by Riban Conbajos — 28 September 2006 @ 12:44 AM
I am so tired and weary of hearing about the terrorists, the al-kaida , the ones who wish to do us harm.
I think the current administration has done more to harm america than any that came before combined. Problem is that most are too dumb or lack the skills to understand anything, anything at all in regard to their constitutional rights. They are a group of contents, fat, lazy, ignorant and mis-informed.
Fate had a hand at this juncture in American History where the public gave up all their rights and handed over the republic in apathy. Blinded by greed and ignorance, divided and confused, the mass of fatties, and flouride numbed sheeple submitted.
Sleeper cells are deep asleep, and never seem to awake, yet “they” have told us about their sneaky tricky ways and can awake at any time. Give up your rights and we can stop the sleepy deep asleep sleeper cells, and stop them before they awake from their scary 5 year slumber..BOO
Are you scared and afraid? I hope so! They want you to be. Becasue the only thing they have to confuse your logic and reason is to pander to your fear.
The two strongest means or control is to pander to either greed or fear, and FEAR is stronger…
Comment by boo@aol.com — 28 September 2006 @ 2:30 AM
Have you ever tried it? I mean, the “work” of a forager is essentially the things most of us think of as a vacation—hunting, fishing, camping, heck, even gathering wild edibles (like roots) has more in common with a nature hike.
Civilization has no monopoly on knowledge. In fact, I’d argue that civilization has greatly reduced the “cornucopia of human thought” once available to our primitive ancestors. There’s a great deal of knowledge we’ll need to recapture that civilization wiped out.
That was Derrick Jensen.
No, actually, one of the most important points about civilization is that it begins when you stop listening to the world. That’s the very point of David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, which we have discussed a good deal recently.
Indeed, despite its basic incompatibility with such things, civilization must allow such basic human needs to be expressed in some small way just to remain viable. Civilization tolerates these holdovers of primitive life, the way a master might indulge a slave with a few momentos of home to keep a full-scale rebellion from erupting, but you should understand that such things survive in spite of civilization, not because of them. To find a society that actually fosters such things, you’ll need to look to the ones we call “primitive.”
There’s some truth in that, and I don’t think the earth cares much whether or not we survive, but I should hope that we do.
That’s almost the opposite of what primitive life is actually like. You should look into some ethnography, it sounds like you’d be very surprised.
Boo—WTF, mate?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 September 2006 @ 12:09 PM
Jason,
yeah, I was going to make a lot of those same points but figured you would come on eventually and make them better.
One thing I wonder though, is this level of cultural diversity possible under primitivism?
Wouldn’t primitivists only know thier closest neighbors cultures on either side, and not neccessarily be on good tems with them?
I mean I agree with all of what you said, but I think a fairly affluent person living in a first world country actually can gain a cornocopia of experiences, and ethnic foods and art and music that maybe the average hunter gatherer would not.
Of course the hunter gatherer would not be a mere consumer but a creater of art and music, but still…I have to wonder.
Another point though is that Civilization is global and needs to be looked at as a whole. The “average” person under civilization, is not a Professional living in New York or Los Angeles, or Paris, but a child laborer in a factory living in a slum in Bolivia, or Haiti
Comment by Ted Heistman — 28 September 2006 @ 2:05 PM
The overwhelming majority of cultural diversity is primitive. Even seemingly disparate civilizatons like contemporary Europe and feudal Japan differ primarily in aesthetics.
No, because of regional fairs and long-distance trade. Even in the Mesolithic, trade networks criss-crossed whole continents, well in advance of civilization.
That’s another point we must always keep in mind. That professional living in New York or Los Angeles or Paris enjoys a life that in many purely material respects approaches that of the hunter-gatherer, but even they do not exceed it–even in a matter such as this, where we might think otherwise. You might argue that while trade networks crossed whole continents, the Old and New Worlds were fairly separate, and there’s some truth in that, but we should also remember that this would vastly increase the cultural diversity in those areas, so while the geographical range may be more limited, the actual diversity we’re in contact with increases.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 September 2006 @ 2:33 PM
good points. I am reminded of all the myriands of vernacular languages destroyed by civilization.
Another thing that I think of too is that in a sense when we become consumers we are alienated from being part of a culture, we don’t make music we just buy cd’s, we don’t make our own food we buy it. We buy art, if we can afforded it we travel and passively observe other cultures while staying in hotels identical to the ones in the US.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 28 September 2006 @ 7:52 PM
Thanks for another good blog. I also appreciate the link to the Wandering Free Families piece. The New World is one of my favorite all time movies. The “Naturals” were literally living in the Garden of Eden before we came along. This paragraph really resonated with me:
“This stands in such stark contrast to the Jamestown colonists: prisoners of a culture they could not escape, compelled by their hollowed out hearts to chase wealth that will never satisfy, obedient to a power uninterested in the simple needs of a human…ease, affection, creativity, peace.”
This is why I left Seattle a few years for life in a smaller culturally-progressive city. Back in Seattle, people would seize you up before you got within 20 feet of them. What kind of car did he step out of? What designer brand is he wearing? Does he have an expensive or cheap watch?
Where I live now many people seem to grasp that there’s more to life than a neurotic accumulating of status symbols. It always puts a smile on my face to see so many people here commuting and running errands on bicycles.
“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” - HG Wells
Comment by Peter — 7 October 2006 @ 11:40 AM
Ever hear of the pretas, usually translated into English as the “hungry ghosts” of Buddhism?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 October 2006 @ 11:58 AM
Civilized or not, humans are a natural species. Nature decides whose DNA continues based upon their Net Creative usefulness. Whether we have cities, yurts, or caves, technology or trash, the way we live has to be creation-based. We have to be able to show the universe that we have something to contribute that will add to the resources of the universe and not consume our planet, our solar system, or ourselves in order to achieve it. The Net Creativity of individuals, communities, and the species is the deciding factor over the Long term. We can achieve a positive result in many ways, but currently, the ‘civilization’ which we know is one of consumption and competition, not one of creation and cooperation.
Condemning THIS civilization doesn’t get us anywhere if we are just going to reduce ourselves and start over again in the same vein of competition with each other. Better for the planet to let it fall apart completely and never come back than to start a ‘different’ one which is more efficient at destroying things with different fuels.
Comment by auntiegrav — 18 November 2006 @ 4:19 PM
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 November 2006 @ 12:50 PM
See also
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 November 2006 @ 8:40 AM
Hello! Help solve the problem.
Very often try to enter the site, but says that the password is not correct.
Regrettably use of remembering. Give like to be?
Thank you!
Comment by AltaGid — 20 August 2007 @ 4:50 PM