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The Shock of Knowing
A review of A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen,
Context Books, New York, 2000.
Derrick Jensen’s third book is a transcendent
memoir of personal pain and a testament to the universal agony of
the human family, a species caught in a destructive mesh that
threatens to engulf the full spectrum of life-forms on the planet.
A bioregional activist and proponent of deep
ecology, Jensen describes the endgame of our species with the
steady, clear-eyed conviction of an individual who has survived
horrific abuse in childhood. Those who have already been concerned
that the human species has taken a wrong turn may find nothing
radically new in this book, but they will find a good many familiar
and troubling insights stated in a new way, in a raw, vivid and
inescapably alarming style. Like the seething arc of an emergency
flare, Jensen’s writing draws our attention to its own unique
trajectory, its moral signature, at the same time that it throws
into high relief the rutted, body-strewn terrain below, the
desolated world where we, each one of us, must take a stand.
A Language Older than Words presents a
trenchant view on how life looks from the front lines of the
millennial war the human species is waging against the natural world
and against itself as a participant in that world. Whatever we
thought we knew about this auto de fe, the massive spectacle
of self-annihilation in which we are all plunged, victims and
perpetrators alike, we will probably regard with heightened concern
after reading Jensen’s arc-welded prose. Through a visceral style,
unadorned honesty and total lack of apologies, he vividly
underscores the terrible journey we’ve entered and heightens the
suspense about what’s ahead, just around the bend. More than
adding to what we know, he changes the way we know it. To come
through his book alive and alert is to be staggered into a new moral
stance by the shock of knowing.
Jensen’s method is not consistent analysis,
proceeding systematically through the issues of the day, but rather
a series of sporadic raids, forays into different aspects of the
problem. Read the twenty-eight chapters of the book in any order you
like, their effect is cumulative rather than consecutive. In the
first chapter, “Silencing” Jensen frankly relates his
father’s brutal rapes and beatings of all the family members,
himself included. Throughout the rest of the book the theme of abuse
resonates from the microcosm of a single family out to the entire
human family and back again, for Jensen views the atrocities
committed by human beings on other human beings without distinction
in scale. All this evil shares a single origin in the insane
behavior of our civilization, although the origin of this insanity
remains a mystery. Even if he does not know what is to be done, he
insists that something must be done to confront the insanity -- and
possibly to resist those who deliberately and perversely enact it.
Jensen avows what to him is “the central question of
our time: what are the sane and appropriate responses to insanely
destructive behavior?” (188)
Here, as elsewhere in his writings, Jensen offers
cogent insights on the machinations of the System, the vast
tentacular military-industrial-commercial complex that sustains
Western civilization. His expose of the pathology peculiar to
humanity is exceptionally vivid, and his appeal to recognize that
the world we’ve made is in a most dangerous situation resonates
boldly in page after page. By
taking the entire argument against the System to a new level of
elucidation, Jensen challenges us to discover a new edge and enter a
deepened commitment in our efforts to resist and disempower the ways
of life that engender violence and destruction.
In large measure, Jensen’s message draws its
intensity from a single urgent insight: the System is going down due
to its innate self-destructiveness (for instance, the “pyramid
scheme” of limitless growth must collapse). Granted this is so,
we must ask: What is to be done, beside
passively standing by and watching it happen? Will the endgame
require forceful confrontation with those who perpetuate the System,
if only to rescue the last enduring rudiments of our common humanity
from extinction? In an interview published in the Utne Reader
(July, 2002), Jensen says flatly
Our culture will not undergo any sort of
voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living...
If the problems are based on mass psychoses, rational solutions will
be of no avail... When someone is abusing someone else, the abuser
needs to be stopped. Which brings us to the question of how do you
redirect the flow of an entire culture. I don”t believe you do.
The dominant culture is irredeemable.
What then is the most positive, morally inspiring
way to respond to the world imposed by the System? In A Language
Older than Words Jensen asserts that our connection with the web
of life is far deeper, older and stronger than our enmeshment in
so-called civilization. Redemption of the System may not be
possible, but atonement with Nature surely is. In beautiful passages
that celebrate the interspecies link, Jensen describes his contact
and communication with the land and non-human species, animals both
wild and domesticated. While he does not pretend that such communion
can change the world-situation, he insists that atonement with the
natural world is essential to individual and social sanity.
And without sanity, how can we face insanity?
Just to bear to live with the daily spectacle of
abuse, lies and extortion — the infernal trinity of the System
— calls for strength that only
comes from reclaiming our bodies and grounding ourselves in the
natural world.
Ghandi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to
stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn’t work.
(188)
The proposition that the human species has become
dangerously alienated from the natural world is quite familiar and
at moments risks becoming esome. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of
A Language Older than Words is the style Jensen uses to
restate and re-enliven this proposition. In a word, his style is visceral.
No doubt the style is a choice, for Jensen is an author
exceptionally gifted in his mastery of language, but it is also
somatically grounded. He suffers from Crohn’s disease, a
degenerative condition of the intestines. The condition entails
periodic crises when he collapses, overcome by a sense of implosion
in his guts, and “a grainy pulling at my bowels, the feeling of
rough-hewn lumber sliding under fingertips (310).” His writing
makes it clear that the physical affliction he suffers is
inseparable from the moral vision into which he transmutes it:
To perceive the world as we perceive our dreams
would be to more closely perceive it as it is. The sky is crying,
from joy or grief I do not know. Waves in a wild river form
bowbacked lovers and speak to me of union. Industrial civilization
tears apart my insides. (312)
On page after page, A Language Older than
Words resonates with a clarion call to recover the mysterious
dream of life and depart from the nightmare we, the human species,
have made of living. His authorial position between these two
dimensions of human reality is precarious and poignant, and the gift
of his voice is to make us aware that we also are caught in the
balance.
He says, “the nightmare cannot be defeated on
its own terms (217),” but he speculates openly about taking
out someone like the head of a major lumber company, Weyerhauser, or
some other CEO easily identifiable as an agent of corporate greed
and global aggression. Then he qualifies the option: “I’m not
suggesting, by the way, that a few well-aimed assassinations would
solve our problems (220).” The problem is that, unlike Jensen’s father, “whose
removal would have stopped the horrors” he was perpetrating on the
family, the agents of global desecration are part of the System, a
vast network that extends beyond them as individuals, and they are
all interchangeable within that network. To kill the identifiable
perpetrators like Slade Gorton and Larry Craig, “two Senators from
the Northwest whose work may charitably be described as genocidal
and ecocidal,” would not slow the destruction, for “the
genocidal and ecocidal programs originating specifically from the
damaged psyches of Gorton and Craig would die with them, but the
shared nature of the destructive impulse would continue, making
their replacement as easy as buying a new hoe (220).”
To my knowledge only one other author has dared
to broach the issue of using violent or murderous force against
perpetration in so brash and unapologetic a way. Wendell Berry,
whose voice complements Jensen’s and, in some respects, outreaches
beyond it, has declared: “If someone raped or murdered a member of
my family, would I not want to kill him? Of course I would, and I
daresay I would enjoy killing him. Or her. If asked, however, if I
think that it would do any good, I must reply that I do not.”
1
Both Berry and Jensen weigh the possible merits of such an option in
the specific, personal case versus the Systemic, corporate case.
Jensen observes that in the personal context, the abuse would end
because the specific abuser would be terminated. Berry, on the other
hand, does not accept that terminating a single perpetrator will do
any good. His view is more aligned to traditional Christian morals,
whereas Jensen represents the heroic ethic that allows for the use
of violent force to resist aggression and defend the weak and
innocent.
Those who might read in Jensen anything like an
appeal to violence as a morally legitimate response to the
identified agents of perpetration are reading him badly, for his
activism does not operate along these lines; yet it does not
absolutely preclude that option, either. He leaves open the daunting
question of how the use of violent force might be required, in some
situations, to protect and preserve life. Clearly, writing letters
to Hitler will not do the trick. What is the difference between the violence endemic to the
System and the violent force that might be required to resist and
defeat those who perpetuate the System? No one knows, but thanks to
Jensen a lot of people are now going to be thinking about it.
A Language Older than Words delineates new
horizons for the future of rage.
And rage, so it happens, is also an heroic
attribute. In my book on the myth of the hero, I traced the
multi-cultural indications that the hero (or heroine) is someone who
carries the exceptional responsibility to direct rage to moral ends.
The force of rage — variously called furor, wut, lust, kudos, ferg,
fury — rises from a surplus in the biological makeup of the human
species. It represents life-force in excess of what is needed merely
to live. “Rage is the male complement to nurture, and equally
essential to the survival of the species.”
2 Derrick
Jensen embodies rage and expresses it with a
poignancy unparalleled in modern alternative political writing. Like
a true warrior, his vulnerability (literally, the ability to be
wounded) is the source of his strength. Indict the insanity of the
modern Western way of life — this he does, indeed. But beyond the
indictment, he seems to be preparing something, to be engendering a
heightened sense of participation for a response that we have not
yet been able to envision. This
acute sense of anticipation is what adds such a shock-value to the
power of knowing what we already know.
How will the anticipation Jensen generates play
out in his future writing and in the wider scope of public response
it may receive? This is anyone’s guess. Of his father, Jensen says
that his mother wishes the man were dead, but “my own wish for him
would be that he live in the full understanding of the damage he has
caused (51).” Here again he brings us to the edge between the
personal and the Systemic manifestations of perpetration. One man or
woman may come to realize the evil they do, but it is pretty clear
by now that a great many of those who perpetrate within the System,
by acting as agents of the System, will never come to admit the
damage they are causing. What Jensen wishes for his father might
also be wished of Senators Gorton and Craig, or George Bush or
Saddam Hussein... but who would wait around for them to come around?
The trick is, whether or not those who play a
more executive role in perpetration ever come to admit their
actions, we are all in the System together, victims and perpetrators
are enmeshed. With a twist on Sartre’s famous one-liner, “Hell
is other people,” Jensen writes: “Hell is the too-late
realization that everything and everyone are interdependent. This
realization is our only salvation (51).” On this note he entitles
the last chapter of his book, “Connection and Cooperation.” For
the epigram he quotes Native American activist, Vine Deloria, Jr.:
“The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to
understand their lives and take up their responsibility to all
living things.”
JLL. Sept 2002
1
“Peaceableness Toward Enemies,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, p. 86.
2
Lash, The Hero, p. 8.
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