A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  It is not possible to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity—mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide— without first convincing yourself and others that what you're doing is beneficial. You must have, as Dr. Robert Jay Lifton has put it, a "claim to virtue." You must be convinced—as the Nazis were convinced that the elimination of the Jews would allow the Aryan "race" to thrive; as the founders of Judeo-Christianity were convinced their misogynist laws were handed down not from their own collective unconscious but from the God they could not admit they created; as my father was convinced he was not beating his son but teaching him diligence, respect, or even spelling; as politicians, scientists, and business leaders today are convinced they're not destroying life on earth but "developing natural resources"—that you are performing a service for humankind.

  Forests have fallen as surely to these claims to virtue as they have to axes, saws, and fellerbunchers. By looking at the successive claims used to rationalize the deforestation of this continent, perhaps we can begin to see not only the transparent stupidity of them but further still to the motives that underlie the destruction.

  Early European accounts of this continent's opulence border on the unbelievable. Time and again we read of "goodly woods, full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle, even in the middest of Summer, in incredible aboundance," of islands "as completely covered with birds, which nest there, as a field is covered with grass," of rivers so full of salmon that "at night one is unable to sleep, so great is the noise they make," of lobsters "in such plenty that they are used for bait to catch the Codd fish." Early Europeans describe towering forests of cedars, with an understory of grapes and berries that stained the legs and bellies of their horses. They describe rivers so thick with fish that they "could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down [and weighted with] a stone." They describe birds in flocks so large they darkened the sky for days at a time and so dense that "a single shot from an old muzzle-loader into a flock of these curlews [Eskimo curlews, made extinct by our culture] brought down 28 birds."

  The early Europeans faced much the same problem we face today: their lofty goals required the destruction of these forests and all life in them, but they couldn't do it without at least some justification. The first two claims to virtue were the intertwining goals of Christianizing the natives and making a profit. These embodied a bizarre yet efficient exchange in which, as Captain John Chester succinctly put it, the natives gained "the knowledge of our faith" while the Europeans acquired "such ritches as the country hath." Both the natives and the "ritches"—including the forests of New England—were quickly cut down.

  Soon the claim to Christianization was dropped, and the rationalization became "Manifest Destiny," the tenet that the territorial expansion of the United States was not only inevitable but divinely ordained. Thus it was God and not man who ordered the land's original inhabitants be removed, who ordered the destruction of hundreds of human cultures and the killing or dispossession of tens of millions of human beings, who ordered the slaughter of 60 million buffalo and 20 million pronghorn antelope to make life tougher. Thus it was God and not man who ordered that the native forests of the Midwest be felled by the ax.

  Manifest Destiny as a claim to virtue soon evolved back into the ideal of making money. An enterprise was deemed as good as it was profitable, while domination and control remained safely unspoken. The forests of the Northwest were described by a corporate spokesperson as "a rich heiress waiting to be appropriated and enjoyed." To be honest, not even this claim was new in any meaningful sense, but a mere recycling of the words of our Judeo-Christian fathers—"And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her ... then thou shalt bring her home to thine house"—with a substitution of trees for women, whipsaws for penises, and the immutable laws of economics for the Immutable laws of God.

  That brings us to today. As the effects of industrial forestry on this continent become increasingly clear—fisheries vanish, biodiversity goes monotone, communities fall apart, and rich biomes become tree farms—corporate profitability loses its effectiveness as a claim to virtue. Another claim—jobs—has arisen, but this has no ring of truth in an era of automation, downsizing, and the Asian lumber mill. The search for a different justification begins anew.

  Recognizing that the forests of this country are in a state of ecological collapse, the timber industry and the politicians and the governmental agencies that serve it have begun to claim the way to improve the health of these massively overcut forests is, unsurprisingly enough, to cut them down. The government has provided, in the words of one of the industry's Senators, "exemptions from environmental laws for logging needed to improve forest health." The Forest Service has disallowed citizens from purchasing federal timber sales to leave the trees standing, because "then the trees won't get cut down." A clearcut is then rationalized by declaring that "while insect and disease populations are currently at endemic levels, there is a potential for spruce bark beetle populations to reach epidemic proportions." In other words, we must cut these admittedly healthy trees because they might get sick someday. The timber transnational corporation Boise Cascade has run advertisements likening clearcuts to smallpox vaccinations.

  It's all insane. It doesn't take a cognitive giant to see that if logging were "needed to improve forest health" there'd be no need to exempt it from environmental laws. The most difficult and disturbing task is to understand how and why, after millennia of deforestation, the destroyers and defenders alike accept each new, ephemeral, transparently false claim to virtue at face value. One reason, of course, is that the pattern itself is horrifying, too terrible to think about. A second reason is that if we allow ourselves to recognize the pattern and fully internalize its implications, we would have to change it. And so we propagate, or at least permit, the myths. It's called passing the buck.

  Rational discussion presupposes rational motivations, yet claims to virtue are always attempts to place rational masks over nonrational urges. This means that to focus on the claims without broadening the debate so that it includes a consideration of the underlying urges is to be irrational and ultimately to fall into the same pattern of destructiveness. Another way to say this is that while the claims themselves possess the veneer of rationality, the process is not rational, and cannot be resolved by rational discussion. It can seem rational, but only within a severely distorted, nonrational framework—and then only so long as one doesn't question the framework itself.

  Take the doctors at Auschwitz. As has been made clear by Lifton, the physicians working there would not have been effective cogs in the Nazi machine without first being quite certain they acted in the best interests of the world, and even in some cases of the Jews themselves. Some exhibited genuine concern for the well-being of the Jews, but only within the strict confines of the Auschwitz reality. In other words, while refusing to question the justice, sanity, or humanity of working prisoners to death or gassing them in assembly-line fashion, and refusing to question the abysmal conditions under which prisoners were housed, they often did what little was left to alleviate suffering.

  One of the most common ways they did this was by preventing outbreaks of typhus, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases by injecting patients with phenol. Children, adults who had long been on the medical block, and others who were ill or had the potential to become ill were selected for injection. The physician or technician filled the syringe from the phenol bottle and thrust the needle into the heart of the patient, emptying the contents of the syringe. Most patients fell dead almost immediately, although some lived for seconds or even minutes. Just like the Forest Service and timber companies, these physicians were preventing outbreaks by killing their patients. This could be rationalized by saying that dead and burned prisoners were no longer infectious risks to the living. Rationale aside, it was murder.

&nbs
p; Paradoxically, the way out from these destructive frames of mind is to step in—experience, not thought or rationalization, is the only cure-all. Instead of hiding behind notions of racial purity or pretending to prevent epidemics, notice that at this moment I am lifting this boy's arm. He is six. His skin is pale. His eyes lock on mine: he is terrified. I am inserting the needle between bis fourth and fifth ribs. It slides in easily. He winces, stifles a sob. I depress the plunger. He stiffens, and before he can fall off the stool my attendant carries him to the back door. The attendant returns, and ushers a woman through the front door. She takes her place on the stool. I begin to lift her left arm. Her eyes, too, lock on mine. I realize, in that instant, that I am the last thing she will ever see.

  Trust experience. Descartes' inversion of what is to be believed makes no sense to me, not to any of my senses. Thought divorced from experience is nonsense. I know from my own childhood this divorce can be essential to survival, but paradoxically, it is this same divorce on the part of perpetrators that gives rise to these awful claims to virtue.

  I was not at Auschwitz. I wasn't there for the first clearcut, or the second, or the thousandth. I can read about death camps, and I can read about the forest that was turned into this book, but if the story is to mean anything to me, if it is to change my life, it must lead back to my own experience. And it does. From a rocky knoll not far from my home, the knoll where the coyotes came to remind me of our deal, I can see clearcuts white on green on a snowy winters day. Entering the region's forests I am sure to encounter more stumps, slash piles, and dead hillsides than trees ancient enough to scream as they go down. There's a place I know near Spokane—by no means unique—where clearcuts wrap around a mountain, drop into a valley, climb a nearby ridge, and cut a swath deep into the next watershed. Recently I walked those clearcuts, past whitened slash piles of wood cut a dozen years ago and past the green limbs of this year's cut, and in ten consecutive miles I never once came within twenty yards of a live tree.

  Do not, however, for a moment believe me. I could be conjuring this clearcut as easily as Gilgamish conjured his claim to virtue. Go look for yourself. Listen to the wind pick up soil that has baked and crumbled. Listen to distant trees speak as they sway, and listen, finally, if you can hear them above the whine of the chainsaws, to their screams as they are felled.

  The relationship between Judeo-Christianity and exploitation is not so straightforward as I may have made it seem. It would not have been enough for the religions founders to have simply made up a God and, as with a hand puppet, put words into the Deity's mouth. To become deaf to the clamoring of one's conscience and to the pleas of victims requires more than fabrication: it requires a belief stronger than experience, unshakable by the spilling of blood.

  This doesn't mean that those who exploit don't consciously fabricate or lie, for they clearly do. Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.

  In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Hitlers justification was that Polish troops had already attacked. This was a simple and conscious lie. Beneath and behind this lie, pushing it into action, was the notion that in order to fulfill its destiny the Aryan "race" needed room to expand. I don't know to what degree Hitler believed this; already we are sliding out of the realm of the conscious lie and into the realm of semiconscious justification for unspoken (and often unspeakable) urges. Pursuing this further we find the belief that Aryans were superior to Poles or other Eastern Europeans, and so more deserving of land. Beneath this belief there were undoubtedly others equally absurd, nesting like so many Russian dolls.

  Another example: The United States Forest Service regularly uses the presence of armilleria root rot as an excuse to cut trees. This is often a conscious lie: examination by plant pathologists routinely reveals armilleria at or beneath endemic levels. In any case, armilleria is a secondary pathogen, which means disturbances, such as cutting trees, actually increase its prevalence in the remaining roots. So the conscious lie becomes self-fulfilling, and the rot becomes pandemic. And then comes another lie, the only way to improve the health of the forest is to cut it down. Beneath all of these lies is the notion that we can manage the landscape without destroying it. And underneath this? The God-given mandate, the evolutionarily-ordained duty, the economic policy, all driven by the notion that we are not normal citizens of this planet, that instead we are the most important creatures— really the only ones who matter—on Earth.

  Back to Judeo-Christianity, and the relationship between this religion and exploitation. Many of the men who drafted the Bible, and the men who later helped shape the Christian worldview, probably believed, sincerely, that it was their God-given right to rape a woman and their holy duty to silence all women. Don't take my word for this. Let the fathers speak for themselves. Tertullian stated that women were "the devil's gateway," and was in agreement with Ambrose that all evil stems from women. Origen, the father of the Alexandrian church, so hated the flesh that he castrated himself to become, in the words of St. Matthew, one of the "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven." He stated, "What is seen with the eyes of the creator is masculine, and not feminine, for God does not stoop to look upon what is feminine and of the flesh."

  Examples of Christian misogyny are legion: St. Chrysotom said, "What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectible detriment, an evil of nature;" St. Thomas Aquinas, "The voice of a woman is an invitation to lust, and therefore must not be heard in church." St. Augustine got right to the point: "I know nothing which brings the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman's caresses."

  This notion that sexuality and women—in fact the earth and all direct experience—bring men down from what is considered most important—the heights to which manly men may attain— is a central theme of our culture. The denigration of the flesh is essential to science, where a body is considered "nothing but a statue or a machine," and where direct experience is considered "mere anecdotal evidence" or noise to be ignored while we search for the real signal. And of course it is fundamental to Christianity: I recently came across a paragraph in the book Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, which details some of the methods used by early Christians to try to control the erotic. It states: "Ammonius used to burn his body with a red-hot iron every time [he felt sexual desire]. Pachon shut himself in a hyena's den, hoping to die sooner than yield, and then he held an asp against his genital organs. Evagrius spent many nights in a frozen well. Philoromus wore irons. One hermit agreed one night to take in a woman who was lost in the desert. He left his light burning all night and burned his fingers on it to remind himself of eternal punishment. A monk who had treasured the memory of a very beautiful woman, when he heard that she was dead, went and dippled his coat in her decomposed body, and lived with this smell to help him fight his constant thoughts of beauty." Clearly, these men suffered.

  It would be comforting, as always, to believe these are the words of a few sad men. We would, as always, be wrong. Origen, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas were influential men. And they articulated—as did Descartes, Bacon, Hitler—deep cultural urges in ways that obviously resonated with a great many people.

  Take Martin Luther, who wrote, "I would have such venomous, syphilitic whores broken on the wheel and flayed because one cannot estimate the harm such filthy whores do to young men who are so wretchedly ruined and whose blood is contaminated before they have achieved full manhood." If his message hadn't resonated, would Luther be known as the father of a church? Would any of these men be esteemed, even beatified? No, their words would have been ignored instead of being translated into action.

  By the time Luther gave voice to his hatred, in the sixteenth century, women had been getting burned at the stake for nearly seven hundred years, since the council of Salzburg in 799 C.E. approved the torture of witches. Of course the legalized murder of women goes much
farther back. Millions of women—up to twenty percent in many communities—were tortured and killed on the pretense that they were witches, and that they had committed crimes against men.

  The extremely influential and popular tome Malleus Maleficarum—which in 180 years went through thirty-five editions in four languages—detailed many of these crimes. Women were murdered, for example, because they did "marvellous things with regard to male organs." It goes on to tell us that women "collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report." According to the women's executioners, these women copulated with devils, traveled on clouds, stole milk, rode atop he-goats or broomsticks and so should be tortured and killed— remember my father never beat anyone without good reason.

  Not only women have suffered at the hands of Christians. As mentioned before, hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples everywhere have been tortured, mutilated, and murdered to further the glory of Christ. "They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [Indians] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. .. .Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." The same is true, in smaller numbers, of the Christian treatment of Jews. Inquisitions, pogroms, and mass exterminations are Christian traditions as well and deeply celebrated as communion. Muslims, too—no mean misogynists themselves—have fallen before the avenging sword of Christ Our Savior. In order to free the Holy Lands of the unworthy, Crusaders repeatedly pillaged their way across eastern Europe and into the Middle East. To bring this discussion full circle, back to a Christian hatred of women, because non-Christian women were at the time of the Crusades considered particularly vile (sexual contact with them causing "an enormous stench to rise to heaven"), and most especially because defeats on the field of battle were inevitably attributed to a lack of chastity on the parts of Crusaders, rape played a smaller role than it normally has in the forward march of civilization. Instead, the Crusaders, as after the battles of Antioch, "did no other harm to the women they found in [the non-Christians'] tents—save that they ran their lances through their bellies."