A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  Moving hive bodies, I found many nests of baby mice: pink, hairless, wriggling. Dogs, cats, and chickens huddled round as I picked up each box, then darted in to snatch mice that were old enough to run and simply swallow those too young to move.

  I had conflicted feelings about the killing. I don't like to kill, especially when it doesn't lead directly to food, but I must admit I've picked up from bees a certain antipathy toward mice. Not only do mice destroy stored equipment, they sometimes, especially in winter, move into occupied hives. They've been known, albeit infrequently, to kill entire colonies, or drive the bees away.

  The discomfort with killing them arose from the fact that my dislike of mice is general, not individual. The babies being swallowed two or three at a time by the dogs, or pecked at, aligned, and swallowed whole by chickens had never harmed me, bees, or anyone. I've not before hesitated—or at least not hesitated long—to kill or drive away mice I've found inside beehives. That never seemed unjust. But as I was cleaning I kept feeling I was doing something wrong.

  My suspicions were confirmed when I arose the next morning. The countertop in my bathroom was covered with mouse droppings, probably fifty pellets where in the several years before there had never been any.

  The message seemed unmistakable, but in the two years since, I've not been able to take the communication further. I've heard other stories of animals defecating to communicate displeasure, of travelers returning home from a too-long vacation to find one pile of cat manure in the center of the bed, or of people who quit feeding squirrels on their porch, only to have the squirrels first beg, then scratch at the windows, and finally leave a neat row of pellets along the railing where once peanuts were placed.

  Perhaps the question of further communication is not so important. Do I really want to carry on an extended conversation with a mouse? I don't even like mice. Perhaps a better, or at least more immediate, question has to do with our status as neighbors. I have to admit the mice didn't ruin all the stored boxes, or even that many. Perhaps in the years before I went on my cleaning frenzy, we were simply coexisting, the ruined boxes my tithe to them, and the occasional nests I found and destroyed in the process of doing my work their tithe back. If I had an arrangement with coyotes whereby they relented from taking "my" chickens in return for a tithe, perhaps the mice, too, considered themselves to have entered into an arrangement with me.

  All of this is speculation. What I know is what I experienced: I made an unprecedented incursion into the place they live, into their home, if you will. That same night they made a similarly unprecedented incursion into the place I live, into my home. Was this a reprimand? A warning? A simple statement of frustration, sorrow, and anger? Or was this, as mechanistic explanations would require, simply random?

  I learn and forget repeatedly that my claims to ownership— especially with regard to living beings—are inevitably illusory. Do I own the barn, and with it the right to end all life that enters? Do I own the beeboxes, and so is it acceptable for me to feed every baby mouse I encounter to my chickens, ducks, dogs, cats? It strikes me that ownership as practiced by our culture is an expression of a will and capacity to control, and even to destroy. It's my barn, so I can do whatever the hell I want with It. The mice are in my barn, so they're mine, too, to trap, poison, feed to chickens, or simply stomp on, if I so choose. The land I live on is mine, so I can poison it with herbicides, pesticides, and Kentucky bluegrass, or I can cut the trees, sell them for two-by-fours, and put up condos if I've a mind to. If I had a wife, she would just as surely be mine, as would any children we might have.

  What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn't mean that none shall die, nor even that I won't kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in turn shares responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we've been taught, a "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don't need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose—even the evolutionary purpose—is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?

  I recently drove cross-country, and I spent a lot of time listening to the radio to pass the miles. I came across a talk show about disciplining children. Caller after caller described the necessity of, in the words of the host, "wearing out the belt." A seven-year-old girl, according to one typical caller, no longer had to be "whipped," as he put it, because she was conditioned to "fall right into line" whenever he mentioned the belt. This caller was proud of his youngest daughter, five, whom he has had to whip only a few times, because, as he said, "She's smart, and she sees what happens when her sister gets out of line."

  The host laughed as he read a news report of a woman upset because when she arrived at the day care to pick up her three-year-old son, she found him crying, his mouth taped shut. The host expressed agreement with a district attorney who would not press charges.

  I heard only one caller speak out against the violence. He said that as a Christian he had no choice but to step in whenever he saw someone publicly strike a child. "Violence against children is wrong," he said, because "it springs from anger, and anger goes against the teachings of Jesus."

  The host, also a self-described Christian, disagreed (for the only time on the show), asking sharply, "What business is it of yours?"

  Hearing that, I thought back to an interaction I had with a woman and a child several years ago. I was at a social services office, waiting with a friend while she straightened out a problem with her medical coupons. The office was crowded, the wait long, the room hot, and tempers short. The conversations I overheard were sharp and tense. A television blared in one corner of the room, making patience or sustained thought nearly impossible.

  Finally my friends name was called. I wandered around the room until a quick movement caught my eye. I turned in time to see a four-year-old slap an infant.

  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 mothe
r 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 ex
amples 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.