A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  One of the problems with our economic system is that money is valued over all else. That is enough to guarantee widespread misery, degradation, and ultimately the destruction of most, if not all, life on this planet. It is axiomatic that people will not pay for that which they can get for free. This means that with certain notable exceptions—professional athletes, many of the self-employed, creative workers such as artists, scientists, members of the helping professions, and so on—most people will not get paid for doing what they would otherwise do, what they love: why should someone pay if you will do it anyway? Another way to say this is that as with grades, if implicit motivation is there, there's no reason for external reward. The counter of this is also true, that oftentimes monetary rewards substitute for implicit motivation. What this means is that so long as money is valued—and in fact necessary—a great percentage of people will end up spending a great deal of time doing things they don't want to do.

  Prior to contact with our culture, it was common for members of indigenous cultures throughout the world to live "a careless life." Indeed, the Khoikhoi were said to "scarcely admit either force or rewards for reclaiming them from that innate lethargick humor. Their common answer to all motives of this kind, is, that the fields and woods provide plenty of necessaries for their support, and nature has amply provided for their subsistence, by loading the trees with plenty of almonds . . . and by dispersing up and down many wholesome brooks and pure rivolets to quench their thirst. So that there is no need of work. . . . And thus many of them idly spend the years of a useless restive life."

  Because our cash economy is predicated on the idea of a society composed of atomistic individuals pulling in selfish directions, it can do no other than reward selfish behavior. Communal behavior is not rewarded in this system, which means the cash economy can do no other than destroy communities. It damages relationships, too, not only because relationships consist of processes, not products, and are thus invisible to the system, but also because any relationship based on atomistic individuals pulling in selfish directions is not a relationship at all. And our cash economy can do no other than destroy life on the planet, because life has neither value nor voice, whereas resources, for example two-by-fours, while still voiceless, have value. Given the system of rewards, it is a surprising testament to the tenacity of life that any viable natural communities persist. It is an open question as to how much longer they will do so.

  Our economics promises a life of increasing ease, which would put us back where we started so many rapes, clearcut forests, and extirpated species ago. For those of us rich enough to reap its benefits, our economic system offers a life devoid of experience; as though life, and experience, were a hassle. I can buy fast food. I can buy fast sex. I can buy fast ideas. It is as though our goal were to pass our days comfortably in an embryonic hot tub, television turned on for community so we need never relate to another living being, umbilical cord attached so we need neither chew nor swallow. This kind of withdrawal makes sense for a traumatized people who believe that they've been forced to inhabit a treacherous world filled with selfish individuals. But if the world is not as they believe, then how sad that we avoid relationships to avoid the hassle.

  Had I been satisfied to buy shrink-wrapped drumsticks at the grocery store, I may never have begun a conversation with coyotes, nor had the honor of meeting that brave Pekin who taught me about death. I would never have dug in a dumpster for the birds, nor felt the communion of generosity with that homeless man. I may not have paid attention to the complaint of the mice, nor the contempt of the lone red coyote. I may never have begun this exploration, with the richness of understanding it has brought to me.

  It's true as well that had I not attended the School of Mines, I would not have high jumped, and had my father not abused me, I may never have been sufficiently alienated from our culture to see it for what it is. Negative experiences can lead to joy and understanding. Life is untidy. When we reject this messiness—and in so doing reject life—we risk perceiving the world through the lens of our economics or our science. But if we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace it, experience it, and ultimately live with it, there is the chance for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity.

  Last December I saw an advertisement outside an electronics store. There was a little boy, delirious with delight, surrounded by computers, stereos, and other gadgets. The text read: "We know what your child wants for Christmas." I stared at the poster, then said to no one in particular, "What your child wants for Christmas is your love, but if he can't get that, he'll settle for a bunch of electronic crap."

  Don't look at my finger. Look at the moon. The point of this book is not to excoriate our culture. To believe that any one thing is "the problem" would be to believe that if we simply reform our economic system, everything will be okay, or if we reform science, or Christianity, or if I simply wait for my father to die, then everything will suddenly be fine.

  But it won't be fine. We need to look deeper. Ours is not the only deathly economics to evolve, and Christianity is not the only body-, woman-, and earth-hating tradition. Women have also been raped, killed, and mutilated to serve Allah. The Hindu code of Manu V decrees that "A woman must never be free of subjugation," and there have been many indigenous cultures as virulently misogynistic as our own. Other systems of knowledge have blinded people to physical reality and have deafened them to the suffering of others as surely as Western science. Other cultures have screwed up the environment, though none with the intensity, scope, enthusiasm, or finality with which we have approached this task.

  But not every culture has done these things.

  Don't look at my finger. Look at the moon.

  We need to look beyond, to the urges that inform, to the hidden wounds and presumptions that lead first to the conceptualization and later implementation of our economics, our science, our religion, our misogyny and child abuse. An economics like ours can emerge only from a consciousness like ours, and only a consciousness like ours can give rise to an economics like ours. To change our economics, science, religion, or our intimate relations with humans and nonhumans, we must fundamentally change our consciousness, and in so doing fundamentally change the way we perceive the world. Try to see the patterns. Look. Look again, and look a third time. Listen.

  Make no mistake, our economic system can do no other than destroy everything it encounters. That's what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That conversion, from living trees to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system. Psychologically, it is the central process of our enculturation; we are most handsomely rewarded in direct relation to the manner in which we can help increase the Gross National Product.

  It's unavoidable: so long as we value money more highly than living beings and more highly than relationships, we will continue to see living beings as resources, and convert them to cash; objectifying, killing, extirpating. This is true whether we're talking about fish, fur-bearing mammals, Indians, day-laborers, and so on. If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it's gone. This story is oft-repeated and oft-ignored. Take the great auk, also called the spearbill in tribute to its massive bill, and called by the Spanish and Portuguese pinguin, which means the fat one, in reference to the soft jumpsuit of blubber that enveloped it. This flightless bird was common throughout Europe, existing side-by-side with humans as far south as the Mediterranean coast of France. By the year 900, the great auk was no longer perceived as a neighbor; it had become a commodity. It was slaughtered commercially for the oil derived from its fat, and for its soft elastic feathers. By the mid-seventeenth century, hyperexploitation had killed all but one of the great auk nesting sites in Europe, and that was destroyed before 1800.

  In North America, too, humans coexisted with great auks for thousands of years, perhaps thousands of human generations. But
they didn't develop an economics requiring the objectification of all others, and so the relationship continued. Humans smoked auk meat to eat through winter; they ate their eggs; they rendered fat into oil which they stored in sacks made from the birds' inflated gullets; they dried the contents of eggs, then ground them into flour from which they made winter pudding. Humans did all this, season after season, generation after generation, causing no appreciable harm to the birds. I do not know what these humans gave to great auks in return, but I would stake any hope I have for continued human existence on the belief that the humans gave something back to these stately black birds, with their powerful lungs and wings made for diving and undersea propulsion. Perhaps all they gave back was the right for them to be.

  The earliest description we have of a North American encounter between Europeans and great auks ends, as these encounters always do, in tragedy for the natives: "Our two barcques were sent off to the island to procure some of the birds, whose numbers were so great as to be incredible. ... In less than half-an-hour our two barcques were laden with them as if laden with stones." The next year another chronicler noted, "This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed." Having been noticed by members of our culture, the fate of the great auk was sealed.

  They were slaughtered for their meat, which was sold. They were slaughtered for their oil, which was sold. They were slaughtered for their feathers, which were sold. Their eggs were taken for markets in Boston and New York. Wrote an Englishman: "These Penguins are as big as geese and . . . they multiply so infinitely upon certain flat islands that men drive them from hence upon a board into their boats by the hundreds at a time, as if God had made the innocency of so poor a creature to become such an abundant instrument in the sustenation of man."

  At last, around the turn of the nineteenth century, bans were placed upon the killing of remnant auk populations. The bans, being as nominal as environmental restrictions are today, were of course ignored, and the last known rookery was destroyed in 1802. But one colony, a tiny one of perhaps 100 individuals, remained, near Iceland. Word of this colony finally reached Europe, and collectors quickly offered a local merchant high prices for eggs. By 1843, most of the birds were gone, and on June 3, 1844, three fishermen killed the last two auks, and smashed the last auk egg.

  It would be easy for me to hate that local merchant and his three hirelings for what they did to the world in general, and to me in particular, when they eradicated these creatures. But as with Chivington, Hitler, Descartes, Bacon, the authors of the Bible, "free market" economist Milton Friedman, and so on ad nauseum, these men were not alone. They had, and continue to have, an entire culture for company. A bureaucrat with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and the Ocean stated the matter perfectly. His honesty is frightening: "No matter how many there may have been, the Great Auk had to go. They must have consumed thousands of tons of marine life that commercial fish stocks depend on. There wasn't room for them in any properly managed fishery. Personally, I think we ought to be grateful to the old timers for handling the problem for us."

  Any being that sparks economic interest is doomed. Eskimo curlews, passenger pigeons, puffins, teals, plovers, all these and more were exterminated or diminished by the insatiable lust for killing that our economics both rationalizes and rewards.

  Sea mink, exterminated for their fur. Beavers, decimated. Wolverines. Fisher, marten, otter. Buffalo, wood bison, pronghorn antelope. Salmon: "A ball could not have been fired into the water without striking a salmon." Cod: "So thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them." Halibut. Herring: "I have seen 600 barrels taken in one sweep of a seine net. Often sufficient salt cannot be procured to save them and they are used as manure." Capelin: "We would stand up to our knees in a regular soup of them, scooping them out with buckets and filling the wagons until the horses could scarcely haul them off the beaches. You would sink to your ankles in the sand, it was that spongy with capelin eggs. We took all we needed for bait and for to manure the gardens, and it was like we'd never touched them at all, they was so plenty."

  You or I could catch all the fish we could ever eat, cut all the trees we could ever use, kill all the animals whose skins we could wear, and we still would not destroy the planet. Or rather, we could kill all that is given to us only so willingly as we give back. What the hell use would it be for me to overfish West Medical Lake, where just tonight I caught my dinner? Why would I possibly take every fish? They would rot. It makes more sense to leave them so I can come back next week or next year, or never. Why should I stop them from living out their lives in their own manner?

  Right now in the Bering Sea forty-five trawlers, each larger than a football field, drop nets thousands of yards long and catch up to 80 tons of fish per day. These ships can remain at sea for months, catching sea lions, seals, pollock, whales, halibut: anything that crosses their paths. Most of what they catch is not worth any money, so it is simply shredded and dumped back in the ocean. If none of the eighty tons of fish could be converted to cash, no sane people would ever want to kill so many, which is itself powerful support for the thesis that our economic system makes us crazy, or at least manifests prior insanity, or both.

  But money doesn't rot. It doesn't swim away to live another day. It doesn't fight back. It doesn't disappear to the bottom of the ocean. It doesn't get eaten by other fish.

  Like the Christian heaven far from Earth, and like the robo-roaches made more pleasing by the removal of their wings and the insertion of electrodes to facilitate their control, money perfectly manifests the desires of our culture. It is safe. It neither lives, dies, nor rots. It is exempt from experience. It is meaningless and abstract. By valuing abstraction over living beings, we seal not only our own fate, but the fates of all those we encounter.

  The Goal Is the Process

  "It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all." Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  WHAT’S THE POINT? Is it to accumulate wealth? If you were to ask 10,000 people if their main goal is to accumulate wealth and material possessions, the overwhelming majority would say no. But if the answer to this question were to be based not on their words, but on how they spend most of their waking hours, the answer would be a resounding yes.

  What if the point of life has nothing to do with the creation of an ever-expanding region of control? What if the point is not to keep at bay all those people, beings, objects, and emotions that we so needlessly fear? What if the point instead is to let go of that control? What if the point of life, the primary reason for existence, is to lie naked with your lover in a shady grove of trees? What if the point is to taste each other's sweat and feel the delicate pressure of finger on chest, thigh on thigh, lip on cheek? What if the point is to stop, then, in your slow movements together, and listen to birdsong, to watch dragonflies hover, to look at your lover's face, then up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family and in so doing abandon any attempt to control them? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, and experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?

  When I went to graduate school that first time, I spent many evenings talking to an instructor in the English department. He mentored me for a year of independent study in creative writing, and we became friends. It was not uncommon for us to talk in his office till dawn. He was a Christian, and one night spoke of his belief: "Your faith must be strong enough that you can walk the path blindfolded."

  Without thinking, I responded, "No. Wherever you put your foot, there is the path. You become the path."

  We
looked at each other, stunned. At the time I had no clue as to the meaning of what I had just said, but I knew it was true.

  Many years later, I taught at Eastern Washington University. The class was organized in a nonlinear fashion, similar to this book. In class we talked about anything: love, sex, death, abuse, money, fear, drugs, games, aspirations, god (with both a large and small g). We played hide-and-go-seek in an empty building. We played duck, duck, goose. We played capture the flag. We learned how to dance. Anything to help imbue our writing and our lives with feeling.

  One quarter I had a student—a good writer and thinker— who often asked, especially when we greatly deviated from the subject of writing, "What's the point?" I usually had no answer, and so merely smiled and shrugged. Sometimes I said, "To have fun," and sometimes, "I don't know."

  On the last day of class I stood at the chalkboard while they called out memories of the class time we'd spent together. I wrote them down as fast as I could, covering board after board. Finally we began to slow, and I heard the same student ask, "What's the point?"