EMPATHY AND ITS OTHER
All places and all beings of the earth are sacred. It is dangerous to designate some places sacred when all are sacred. Such compromises imply that there is a hierarchy of value, with some places and some living beings not as important as others. No part of the earth is expendable; the earth is a whole that cannot be fragmented, as it has been by the destroyers’ mentality of the industrial age. The greedy destroyers of life and bringers of suffering demand that sacred land be sacrificed so that a few designated sacred places may survive; but once any part is deemed expendable, others can easily be redefined to fit the category of expendable. As Ruth Rudner points out in her article “Sacred Land,” what spiritual replenishment is possible if one must travel through ghastly fumes and ravaged lands to reach the little island or ocean or mountain that has been preserved by the label sacred land?
There can be no compromise with these serial killers of life on earth because they are so sick they can’t stop themselves. They would like the rest of us to embrace death as they have, to say, “Well, all this is dead already, what will it matter if they are permitted to kill a little more?” Even among the conserva- tion groups there is an unfortunate value system in place that writes off or sacrifices some locations because they are no longer ‘”virgin.” Those who claim to love and protect the Mother Earth have to love all of her, even the places that are no longer pristine. Ma ah shra true ee, the giant serpent messenger, chose the edge of the uranium mining tailings at Jackpile Mine for his reappearance; he was making this point when he chose that unlikely location. The land has not been desecrated; human beings desecrate only themselves.
Leslie Marmon Silko410
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWENTY. In the Q & A after a recent talk, a woman said that part of the problem is that most of the people she knows who care about the health and well-being of oppressed humans and salmon and trees and rivers and the earth—life—do so because, by definition, they care about others. They empathize. They feel connections with these others. They identify with these others.411 Those who don’t care about the health and well-being of oppressed humans and salmon and trees and rivers and the earth—life—don’t care because, also by definition, they don’t care. They don’t empathize.412 They don’t feel connections with these others. That’s a problem, she said.
She’s right. That’s a big problem. Those of us who value life over things and control value life over things and control. Those who value things and control over life value things and control over life. Sure, many environmentalists are jerks, and I’m sure some CEOs are very nice people. Robert Jay Lifton made the point that many of the Nazi guards at concentration camps and even many of the upper level SS officers were good family men,413 and many people have pointed out that there are many torturers who “do it for a living,” and who when they go home are not horrid people. Lifton called this split in one’s psyche doubling , which he defines as the formation of a second self-structure morally at odds with one’s prior self-structure.414 It’s a defense mechanism that allows people to continue to perpetrate violent behavior, he says, whether that behavior is more direct, as in murdering Jews face to face, or less direct, as in designing or building nuclear bombs or running a corporation. I have tremendous respect for Lifton, and have been deeply influenced by his important work, but within this extremely violent culture I’m not sure doubling is quite so prominent as we would normally think.
I would instead see this as a manifestation of typical abusive behavior. Abusers, as is true for most all of us who live in this abusive society, are exquisitely sensitive to power structures, knowing on whom they can project their unmetabolized rage and to whom they must bend their knee. In other words, they are intimately acquainted with Premise Four of this book, and know the precise circumstances under which it will not only be acceptable but fully expected for them to perpetrate violence on those beneath them and suck up to those above: Unfortunately, too few SS guards fragged their officers. Further, Susan Griffin has written extensively about what constituted “normal” family structures within that particular German culture, and the relationship between familial abuse and the larger violence of the Nazis.415 We could make the same argument today: a normal family within this larger culture is pretty damn violent. This doubling then is not quite so dramatic as it may have seemed.
I’d see the problem instead as the numbing that is a normalized and necessarily chronic state within this culture, an inculcation into the rigid world of Premise Four, where people’s empathies are numbed by the routine violence done to them, then trumped by ideology and what Lifton calls “claims to virtue”—Lifton makes clear that before people can commit any mass atrocity they must have a “claim to virtue,” that is, they must consider what they’re doing not in fact an atrocity but something good416—such that they can feel good about themselves (or rather seem to feel good about themselves) as they oppress others to maintain their lifestyle, then go home and dandle their babies on their knees. This is how many Nazis could maintain semblances of lives as they did not kill Jews but rather purified the Aryan race. This is how Americans could maintain façades of happiness as they didn’t kill Indians but fulfilled their Manifest Destiny. This is how the civilized can pretend to be emotionally healthy as they do not commit genocide and destroy landbases, but instead take what they need to develop their “advanced state of human society.” This is how we can all pretend we are sane as no one kills the planet, but as people maximize profits and develop natural resources.
As well as asking myself each day whether I want to write or blow up a dam, each day I ask myself whether all my talk of saving salmon or old growth or migratory songbirds is just another claim to virtue. I mean, don’t those at the center of empire always say they’re only perpetrating (defensive) violence against those who want to destroy their 417 lifestyle? And aren’t I saying that I’m considering (defensive) violence to maintain a lifestyle that I want? One wants consumer goods, the other wants wild salmon. What’s the difference? Maybe my desire to liberate rivers is just a mask to cover an urge to destroy dams, or more broadly just an urge to destroy. I don’t feel I have a generic urge to destroy but presumably neither do CEOs. That’s the wonderful thing about denial: you generally don’t know you’re in it. But that’s one reason I’m trying to lay out my premises so explicitly. I don’t want to lie to myself, and I don’t want to lie to you.
Each day when I ask whether my work is just an elaborate claim to virtue, I keep coming back to the same answer: clean water. We need clean water to survive. We need a living landbase to survive. We do not need cheap consumables. We do not need a “purified Aryan race.” We do not need to fulfill a Manifest Destiny to overflow the continent or world. We do not need an “advanced state of human society” (even if that were an accurate definition of civilization). We do not need to maximize profits or “develop natural resources.” We do not need oil, computers, cell phone towers, dams, automobiles, pavement, industrial farming, industrial education, industrial medicine, industrial production, industry. We do not need civilization. We—human beings, human animals living in healthy, functioning communities—existed perfectly fine without civilization for the overwhelming majority of our existence. However, we do need a living landbase. This is not a claim to virtue. This is just true.
Each day I remember that I am not wrong because I come back to understanding that every stream in the United States is now contaminated with carcinogens. I come back to the fact that wild salmon, who survived tens of millions of years of ice ages, volcanoes, the Missoula Flood, for crying out loud,418 are not surviving one hundred years of this culture. I come back to knowing there is now dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. I come back to the knowledge that tigers, great apes, and amphibians are being exterminated. Now. This is all real. This is the real world.
Each day I understand anew the simplemindedness that would cause someone to think that just because claims to virtue are sometimes used to
justify violence that all reasons for violence are artificial justifications. I fall into this trap myself all too often. Too many people within this culture do that. But this trap is just that, a trap: the mother mouse made this clear to me, as have all those mothers and others who care enough for the health and well-being of those they love to fight for them. There are some things worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth killing for.
Now, I understand that inculcation into civilization’s insane ideology has caused many people in this culture to believe that the others whom this culture is killing are not actually alive: after all, a river doesn’t feel, does it? Nor do animals in zoos or in factory farms, nor certainly do plants in factory farms, nor stones in quarries.
But does someone’s prior indoctrination mean they need not be stopped?
This I know: Indigenous peoples have entirely different relationships to each other and to the land, based on perceiving “nature” as consisting of beings (including humans) to enter into relationship with, not objects to be exploited. This I know, too: those working to protect land they love are working to protect land they love, and those destroying the land must not love it, or surely they would not destroy it.
Part of what I’m getting at is that those who value things and control more than life can be more likely to kill to gain things or control than if these values were reversed. Obviously: they value things and control more than they do life. As we see. On the other hand, if we value life over control or things, we’re less likely to kill even to defend life. As we also see. When groups holding these different values come into conflict this functional difference makes for a grotesquely uneven contest, or if you will allow me the language, battle.419
This was true of the plots against Hitler. Many plotters argued over whether to kill Hitler as he blithely caused millions to die. Even during the July 20, 1944, coup attempt the plotters merely arrested Hitler’s henchmen. When the coup failed that night these same henchmen didn’t hesitate to kill the plotters, or at least the lucky ones: others they tortured before killing.
We’ve seen this same disparity time and again in interactions between the civilized and the indigenous. We can read account after account of the indigenous welcoming the civilized as guests, showering them with gifts, giving them food, keeping them alive, and we can read account after account of the civilized killing, dispossessing, enslaving the indigenous. Years ago I heard an account of the Indian writer Sherman Alexie saying he wished he would have been alive five hundred years ago to greet Christopher Columbus. Alexie described what he would have done to Columbus with a bow and arrow, or hatchet, or axe, or gun, or chainsaw, then concluded by saying, “No, I wouldn’t have done that. I would have invited him in and fed him dinner, because that’s what my people do.”
This is what many Indians did. Some in time learned that their generosity and kindness was not only misplaced, but in this case suicidal. Some Indians of course have fought back. And when they do? “In war they shall kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”
We see this same thing today, every moment of every day. Those who run governments and corporations routinely lie, steal, cheat, murder, imprison, torture, dispossess, cause people to disappear. They make and use no end of weapons. We, on the other hand, make really cool papier-mâché masks and pithy signs. Some of us even write really big books.420 We try to act honorably.
There is of course nothing wrong with acting honorably, and with having empathy. Those are both good and important things. These qualities are supposed to guide our lives. But what do we do when faced with people who are themselves not honorable, and who lack empathy?
Part of the problem is that in general abusers know what they want and know what they’ll do to get it. They want to control everything they can and destroy what they can’t. They’ll do anything to achieve that. We, on the other hand, for the most part don’t even know what we really want, and in any case we’re not sure what we’re willing to do to accomplish it.
I know what I want. I want to live in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, a world with more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, a world with more ancient forests every year than the year before, a world with less dioxin in each mother’s breast milk every year than the year before, a world with wild tigers and grizzly bears and great apes and marlins and swordfish. I want to live on a livable planet.
Richard Slotkin wrote an excellent book called Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. It’s part of a trilogy, the other two components of which are Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment . Slotkin examines, among other things, the portrayal in popular fiction of conflicts between those at the center of the American empire and their enemies—for the most part those whose land they want to steal. Because writers of popular fiction are, like other writers, propagandists, he’s interested in their role as boosters of empire and articulators of the means by which acts of aggression are rationalized. A pattern Slotkin makes clear is that in book after book (and in real life) the agents of empire always want to fight fair—to fight “by civilized rules”—but every time they’re prevented from doing so because the other side fights dirty. Whites want to deal with Indians fairly, but because Indians are savages (or as the Declaration of Independence puts it: “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”), if we are to combat them, well, we have to fight like they do (or rather like we pretend they do) and slaughter them all (or as Jefferson put it, “destroy them all”) as we take their land (of course taking their land only in defensive warfare: as Jan Van Riebeeck commented on the similar conquest of South Africa by the Dutch, that the land had been “justly won by the sword in defensive warfare, and that it was now our intention to retain it”421). It was the same story in the Philippines, where the United States wouldn’t have had to exterminate the natives (one American military officer stated: “We exterminated the American Indians, and I guess most of us are proud of it, or, at least, believe the end justified the means; and we must have no scruples about exterminating this other race standing in the way of progress and enlightenment, if it is necessary”422), that is, we wouldn’t have had to destroy them all (General Jacob H. Smith: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better you will please me”423), if the nasty Filipinos hadn’t fought unfair first (which, as in Premise Four of this book, means fighting back at all). It was the same in the Korean War, where the Americans would have fought fairly if only the damn commies would have played by the rules. And in Vietnam, where we wouldn’t have had to napalm the country and massacre literally millions of noncombatants if only they, too, would not have fought dirty. The same is true today where we have to break the rules to fight the terrorists, an enemy who, according to the President of the United States, “hides in shadows and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy that [sic] preys on innocent and unsuspecting people and then runs for cover.”424 If only terrorists would play by the rules, then we would too. But they don’t, so, regrettably, we must just this once fight dirty.
If you’ve ever seen a cop movie, I’m sure you’ve seen this same plot. Dirty Harry would and could be clean if only the bad guys were not so terribly dirty. And it’s not just Harry who is dirty: the same is true for cop after cop in movie after movie. It’s a genre convention.
It wasn’t really possible for me to see cop or war movies the same after reading Slotkin’s work. Nor was it possible for me to see civilized wars the same.
I received confirmation of this pattern yet again just today, as I read the justification by a U.S. soldier for the torture of Iraqi noncombatant prisoners, which includes rape, sodomy, taking pictures of them while forcing them to masturbate, taking pictures of them while forcing them to simulate sex, sensory deprivation, water deprivation, forcing them to kneel or stand for hours, attaching electrical wires to their genit
als, forcing them to stand on boxes holding electrical wires and telling them that if they step off the box they will die, putting a saddle on at least one woman in her seventies and riding her around while telling her that she is a donkey, and of course good old-fashioned smackyface leading to their deaths. His justification? “You got to understand, although it seems harsh, the Iraqis they only understand force. If you try to talk to them one on one as a normal person, they won’t respect you, they won’t do what you want, prisoner or just normal person on the street. So you’ve got to be forceful with them in some ways.”425 If you don’t beat them, they won’t do what you want: the key to understanding our culture’s relationship ethos in one phrase.
Slotkin could have predicted his justification. By now we should be able to as well.
But that’s not really why I bring it up now. I bring it up now because I don’t want to fall into the same trap Slotkin describes. In some ways this is similar to my concern over claims to virtue: a daily round of self-examination. I don’t want to say, “Just this once I need to deviate from my peaceful ways to enter into defensive warfare” unless I’m sure that a) my ways really are peaceful; b) the warfare really is defensive, and c) this deviation really is a need. At the same time I don’t want to be narcissistic and short-sighted enough to presume that my own sense of self-righteousness—After all, says the pacifist™, I choose the moral high ground—is more important than the survival of salmon, murrelets, migratory songbirds, my nonhuman neighbors whose land this was long before I was born. Nor do I want to choose my own self-righteousness over the survival, ultimately, of human beings. Because if we continue on this same path, it is not only murrelets who will be exterminated. Human beings will not survive.
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