German Reichskanzler Paul von Hindenburg described the relationship perfectly: “Without colonies no security regarding the acquisition of raw materials, without raw materials no industry, without industry no adequate standard of living and wealth. Therefore, Germans, do we need colonies.”21
Of course someone already lives in the colonies, although that is evidently not of any importance.
But there’s more. Cities don’t arise in political, social, and ecological vacuums. Lewis Mumford, in the second book of his extraordinary two-volume Myth of the Machine, uses the term civilization “to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.”22 (The anthropologist and philosopher Stanley Diamond put this a bit more succinctly when he noted, “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”23) These attributes, which inhere not just in this culture but in all civilizations, make civilization sound pretty bad. But, according to Mumford, civilization has another, more benign face as well. He continues, “These institutions would have completely discredited both the primal myth of divine kingship and the derivative myth of the machine had they not been accompanied by another set of collective traits that deservedly claim admiration: the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of visual and musical arts, the effort to widen the circle of communication and economic intercourse far beyond the range of any local community: ultimately the purpose to make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered.”24
Much as I admire and have been influenced by Mumford’s work, I fear that when he began discussing civilization’s admirable face he fell under the spell of the same propaganda promulgated by the lexicographers whose work I consulted: that this culture really is “advanced,” or “higher.” But if we dig beneath this second, smiling mask of civilization—the belief that civilization’s visual or musical arts, for example, are more developed than those of noncivilized peoples—we find a mirror image of civilization’s other face, that of power. For example, it wouldn’t be the whole truth to say that visual and musical arts have simply grown or become more highly advanced under this system; it’s more true that they have long ago succumbed to the same division of labor that characterizes this culture’s economics and politics. Where among traditional indigenous people—the “uncivilized”—songs are sung by everyone as a means to bond members of the community and celebrate each other and their landbase, within civilization songs are written and performed by experts, those with “talent,” those whose lives are devoted to the production of these arts. There’s no reason for me to listen to my neighbor sing (probably off-key) some amateurish song of her own invention when I can pop in a CD of Beethoven, Mozart, or Lou Reed (okay, so Lou Reed sings off-key, too, but I like it). I’m not certain I’d characterize the conversion of human beings from participants in the ongoing creation of communal arts to more passive consumers of artistic products manufactured by distant experts—even if these distant experts are really talented—as a good thing.
I could make a similar argument about writing, but Stanley Diamond beat me to it: “Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. Moreover, writing provides the ruling classes with an ideological instrument of incalculable power. The word of God becomes an invincible law, mediated by priests; therefore, respond the Iroquois, confronting the European: ‘Scripture was written by the Devil.’ With the advent of writing, symbols became explicit; they lost a certain richness. Man’s word was no longer an endless exploration of reality, but a sign that could be used against him. . . . For writing splits consciousness in two ways—it becomes more authoritative than talking, thus degrading the meaning of speech and eroding oral tradition; and it makes it possible to use words for the political manipulation and control of others. Written signs supplant memory; an official, fixed, and permanent version of events can be made. If it is written, in early civilizations [and I would suggest, now], it is bound to be true.”25
I have two problems, also, with Mumford’s claim that the widening of communication and economic intercourse under civilization benefits people as a whole. The first is that it presumes that uncivilized people do not communicate or participate in economic transactions beyond their local communities. Many do. Shells from the Northwest Coast found their way into the hands of Plains Indians, and buffalo robes often ended up on the coast. (And let’s not even mention noncivilized people communicating with their nonhuman neighbors, something rarely practiced by the civilized: talk about restricting yourself to your own community!) In any case, I’m not certain that the ability to send emails back and forth to Spain or to watch television programs beamed out of Los Angeles makes my life particularly richer. It’s far more important, useful, and enriching, I think, to get to know my neighbors. I’m frequently amazed to find myself sitting in a room full of fellow human beings, all of us staring at a box watching and listening to a story concocted and enacted by people far away. I have friends who know Seinfeld’s neighbors better than their own. I, too, can get lost in valuing the unreality of the distant over that which surrounds me every day. I have to confess I can navigate the mazes of the computer game Doom 2: Hell on Earth far better than I can find my way along the labyrinthine game trails beneath the trees outside my window, and I understand the intricacies of Microsoft Word far better than I do the complex dance of rain, sun, predators, prey, scavengers, plants, and soil in the creek twenty yards away. The other night, I wrote till late, and finally turned off my computer to step outside and say goodnight to the dogs. I realized, then, that the wind was blowing hard through the tops of the redwood trees, and the trees were sighing and whispering. Branches were clashing, and in the distance I heard them cracking. Until that moment I had not realized such a symphony was taking place so near, much less had I gone out to participate in it, to feel the wind blow my hair and to feel the tossed rain hit me in the face. All of the sounds of the night had been drowned out by the monotone whine of my computer’s fan. Just yesterday I saw a pair of hooded mergansers playing on the pond outside my bedroom. Then last night I saw a television program in which yet another lion chased yet another zebra. Which of those two scenes makes me richer? This perceived widening of communication is just another replication of the problem of the visual and musical arts, because given the impulse for centralized control that motivates civilization, widening communication in this case really means reducing us from active participants in our own lives and in the lives of those around us to consumers sucking words and images from some distant sugar tit.
I have another problem with Mumford’s statement. In claiming that the widening of communication and economic intercourse are admirable, he seems to have forgotten—and this is strange, considering the sophistication of the rest of his analysis—that this widening can only be universally beneficial when all parties act voluntarily and under circumstances of relatively equivalent power. I’d hate to have to make the case, for example, that the people of Africa—perhaps 100 million of whom died because of the slave trade, and many more of whom find themselves dispossessed and/or impoverished today—have benefited from their “economic intercourse” with Europeans. The same can be said for Aborigines, Indians, the people of pre-colonial India, and so on.
I want to re-examine one other thing Mumford wrote, in part because he makes an argument for civilization I’ve seen replicated so many times elsewhere, and that actually leads, I think, to some of the very serious problems we face today. He concluded the section I quoted above, and I reproduce i
t here just so you don’t have to flip back a couple of pages: “ultimately the purpose [is] to make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered.” But just as a widening of economic intercourse is only beneficial to everyone when all exchanges are voluntary, so, too, the imposition of one group’s values and purposes onto another, or its appropriation of the other’s discoveries, can lead only to the exploitation and diminution of the latter in favor of the former. That this “exchange” helps all was commonly argued by early Europeans in America, as when Captain John Chester wrote that the Indians were to gain “the knowledge of our faith,” while the Europeans would harvest “such ritches as the country hath.”26 It was argued as well by American slave owners in the nineteenth century: philosopher George Fitzhugh stated that “slavery educates, refines, and moralizes the masses by bringing them into continual intercourse with masters of superior minds, information, and morality.”27 And it’s just as commonly argued today by those who would teach the virtues of blue jeans, Big Macs™, Coca-Cola™, Capitalism™, and Jesus Christ™ to the world’s poor in exchange for dispossessing them of their landbases and forcing them to work in sweatshops.
Another problem is that Mumford’s statement reinforces a mindset that leads inevitably to unsustainability, because it presumes that discoveries, inventions, creations, works of art and thought, and values and purposes are transposable over space, that is, that they are separable from both the human context and landbase that created them. Mumford’s statement unintentionally reveals perhaps more than anything else the power of the stories that hold us in thrall to the machine, as he put it, that is civilization: even in brilliantly dissecting the myth of this machine, Mumford fell back into that very same myth by seeming to implicitly accept the notion that ideas or works of art or discoveries are like tools in a toolbox, and can be meaningfully and without negative consequence used out of their original context: thoughts, ideas, and art as tools rather than as tapestries inextricably woven from and into a community of human and nonhuman neighbors. But discoveries, works of thought, and purposes that may work very well in the Great Plains may be harmful in the Pacific Northwest, and even moreso in Hawai’i. To believe that this potential transposition is positive is the same old substitution of what is distant for what is near: if I really want to know how to live in Tu’nes, I should pay attention to Tu’nes.
There’s another problem, though, that trumps all of these others. It has to do with a characteristic of this civilization unshared even by other civilizations. It is the deeply and most-often-invisibly held beliefs that there is really only one way to live, and that we are the one-and-only possessors of that way. It becomes our job then to propagate this way, by force when necessary, until there are no other ways to be. Far from being a loss, the eradication of these other ways to be, these other cultures, is instead an actual gain, since Western Civilization is the only way worth being anyway: we’re doing ourselves a favor by getting rid of not only obstacles blocking our access to resources but reminders that other ways to be exist, allowing our fantasy to sidle that much closer to reality; and we’re doing the heathens a favor when we raise them from their degraded state to join the highest, most advanced, most developed state of society. If they don’t want to join us, simple: we kill them. Another way to say all of this is that something grimly alchemical happens when we combine the arrogance of the dictionary definition, which holds this civilization superior to all other cultural forms; hypermilitarism, which allows civilization to expand and exploit essentially at will; and a belief, held even by such powerful and relentless critics of civilization as Lewis Mumford, in the desirability of cosmopolitanism, that is, the transposability of discoveries, values, modes of thought, and so on over time and space. The twentieth-century name for that grimly alchemical transmutation is genocide: the eradication of cultural difference, its sacrifice on the altar of the one true way, on the altar of the centralization of perception, the conversion of a multiplicity of moralities all dependent on location and circumstance to one morality based on the precepts of the ever-expanding machine, the surrender of individual perception (as through writing and through the conversion of that and other arts to consumables) to predigested perceptions, ideas, and values imposed by external authorities who with all their hearts—or what’s left of them—believe in, and who benefit by, the centralization of power. Ultimately, then, the story of this civilization is the story of the reduction of the world’s tapestry of stories to only one story, the best story, the real story, the most advanced story, the most developed story, the story of the power and the glory that is Western Civilization.
CLEAN WATER
A sense of place is critical. For people who live with the land, the land becomes the center of their universe. It’s a marriage. We are in a symbiotic relationship with the land where we live, and the notion that this relationship should or even can be transcended is central to many of our problems, and to many of the problems we’ve created for others. Land is something to be respected, and this respect for land makes respect for self and others possible.
Richard Drinnon 28
OR MAYBE I SHOULD RESTATE THAT. THE STORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION is not the story of that reduction, but of its attempted reduction. Certainly it has already succeeded in eliminating many of the stories—the stories of great auks, passenger pigeons, many of the indigenous of Europe, North America, Africa, and elsewhere, the great herds of bison, the stories of free-flowing rivers—but it will never succeed in reducing all stories to one. The world won’t let it. And, to the very best of my abilities, neither will I.
An action’s morality—or at the very least its perceived morality—can shift depending not only on one’s perspective, but also of course on circumstance. For one example of this, let’s talk for a moment about sex.
I have a friend who was a virgin into his thirties, mainly because he was terrified of women, terrified of life, terrified of himself. One day he somehow got hooked up on a blind date—the first date of his life—with a woman, also in her thirties, who had one child. This woman, too, was frightened, but of something else. She was afraid of raising a child by herself, of growing old with no one at her side.
That first night they had sex, at her instigation. My friend, who had never before spent any real private time with any woman, was hooked. It felt good to have someone want him. She, in her desperation and loneliness, I thought, took advantage of his naïveté and fear to quickly reel him in.
That’s how I saw it at the time. And though I felt protective of my friend, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t feel it was my place. I’m glad now that I didn’t because I was wrong. Meeting her, and having sex with her, and entering into a relationship with her, was the best thing that ever happened to him. Their love became the centerpost of his life, and he is a far better and happier man for it. She, too, is happier than she would otherwise have been.
I knew someone else who, by the time he was thirty, had long lost count of his sexual partners. They had to number in the hundreds. The number really doesn’t matter. His compulsion does. He knew only one way to relate to women, which was, to use his word, to “bone” them. I didn’t know him very long, but in that short time he told me, or attempted to tell me before I’d leave the room, of his sexual encounters on the presidential yacht (he was a lobbyist, with access to the president, or at least his yacht), in elevators, in the bathroom of an airplane, in the back seats of enough cars to make his own parade. His sexuality was objectifying and harmful. It was clear from his accounts—although equally clear was the fact that he did not allow himself to become consciously aware of this—that his sexual use of women hurt many of them: he kept asking me why I thought so many of these women insisted he never under any circumstances contact them again.
The point is simple: life—and morality—is far too complex to allow us to say that sex is either good or ba
d. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. It is possible for a sexual act to be profoundly moral and beautiful, and it is equally possible for other circumstances, participants, motivations, to cause it to be just as profoundly immoral and/or ugly. Sometimes sexuality can be neither moral nor immoral, and carry no particular moral weight. Of course sex isn’t the point. Remaining open to one’s current experience is. Life is circumstantial. Morality is circumstantial. An action that may be moral to the point of obligation in one circumstance could as easily be just as immoral in another. This is true of any action with moral implications.
None of this is to say that there are no moral absolutes. It’s merely to say we have become confused as to what they are, how we can discern them, and having discerned them, how we can make sense of them and allow them to guide our lives.
Years ago I got into an argument with a woman over whether rape is a bad thing. I said it was. She—and I need to say that she was dating a philosopher at the time, and has since regained her sanity—responded, “No, we can say that rape is a bad thing. But since humans assign all value”—and presumably both she and her philosopher boyfriend meant most especially those humans who have most fully internalized the messages of this culture, and who therefore receive its greatest social rewards—“humans can decide whether rape is good or bad. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it. It just is. Now, we can certainly tell ourselves a series of stories that cause us to believe that rape is bad, that is, we can construct a set of narratives reinforcing the notion that rape is harmful, but we could just as easily construct a set of narratives that tell us quite the opposite.”
There are two ways in which she was absolutely correct. The first has to do with the importance of stories in telling us how to live. If the stories you heard from birth on repeat to you in one way or another the messages that industrial civilization benefits human beings; that “civilized” people do not commit atrocities (they are, so to speak, civil); that violence is “barbaric,” and that “barbarians” are violent; that someone who is violent is an “animal,” a “brute”; that only the most successful at dominating survive; that nonhumans (and many humans) are here for us to use; that nonhumans (and many humans) have no desires of their own; that sorrow, anger, frustration, loneliness will somehow dissipate if only you buy something;29 that the government of the United States (or Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union, or Luxembourg, for that matter) has your best interests at heart; that working in the wage economy, i.e., having a job, is natural, normal, desirable, or necessary; that the world is a vale of tears and that you will go to a better place when you die; that the morality of violence or any other action is simple; that those in power are too strong—or perhaps they rule by divine right or its modern equivalent, historical inevitability—to be brought down; that we would all suffer if civilization were taken out; that there have been no other ways to live that have been more peaceful, sustainable, and just plain happy than civilization; that those in power have the right to destroy the planet, and that there is little or nothing we can do to stop them, then of course you will come to believe all of that. If, on the other hand, the stories you are told are different, you will grow to believe and act far differently.
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