I wonder what Derrick Jensen is doing these days. Western civilization is being destroyed, but it’s not about helping the salmon. The people out vandalizing, hating on our inheritance, felling statues of anyone and everyone that come to hand, craven politicians presiding over the ruin of America’s cities, allowing crime to escalate, encouraging the homeless and the insane to camp on the sidewalks where shit and used needles mix with the garbage… these are not people hoping and willing to go without ready electricity so that salmon might live. The civilization they are destroying is not the one Derrick used to criticize so evocatively.
There are two very different ways of thinking about civilization. On one hand, it’s the one begun in Mesopotamia – the predatory culture centered on cities and relying on plundering the hinterlands, evolving better and better technologies, but using them too often to subjugate neighbors and destroy the wilds. But there is another kind of civilization much, much older, and the very first large settlements still show its evidence. Being civilized also means being civil. Knowing how to be civil. How to show restraint and fairness, and aim for balance of power. Having the skills to solve conflicts peacefully, to create economies that cycle rather than grow obsessively and endlessly, being courteous, respecting women (and men as well), paying attention to the widow and the orphan as the biblical prophets put it. It means talking out disagreements. It means thinking things through for the good of the community. It means altruistic punishment, being willing to stick one’s neck out to penalize behavior that spreads waves of harm through human settlements and destroys the work of ancestors without remorse. It means thinking of the seventh generation. It means the Golden Rule.
That kind of civilization emerged in our tribal days. When the Iroquois Confederacy came to be, what was it but a great civilized invention? When a form of governance was invented that brought peace among tribes caught up in endless wars, wasn’t that civilized? When the matrons had significant control over the chiefs, and both sexes shared power, though in different ways, wasn’t that civilized? When the Eskimos learned to watch their Big Men supercarefully, being willing to even risk one’s own life in challenging such a person if they got out of hand, wasn’t that civilized? On the other hand, when Cahokia descended into mass human sacrifice, later followed on that path by the Aztecs and preceded by the later Sumerians, that was descent into barbarism, wasn’t it, despite their fancy pyramids that remain to this day.
There are many accounts of the early contacts with American Indians, before things fell apart into mutual acrimony, hatred, and massacre, of the Indians being more “Christian” than the newly arrived Europeans. More charitable, more thoughtful in their community debates and governance, admirably eloquent, and living in such ways that freedom – to speak one’s thoughts, to follow one’s dreams, to explore and to enjoy life – was promoted. They even had ways to turn captured enemies into friends and relations by adoption. So many rather “barbarian” settlers longing for something better ran away to the Indians that laws had to be passed to stanch the flow. And Indians raised among the whites mostly went back to the tribal ways whenever they could. Among the “savages” a person could live better and freer than in the joyless Calvinist villages of the former Europeans. It is said that the stubborn leaning away from monarchy that worked its way among the Colonists like hidden mycelium until it came to fruit in the American Revolution was fed by acquaintance with, and inspiration by, the Indian ways.
The destruction of the West follows a different pattern. Rioters and vandals are celebrated and excused, criminals are elevated to martyrdom, people who refuse to say black is white and red is blue are hounded and “cancelled” – their livelihoods ruined, their lives turned into a nightmare as the mob pursues them. The center no longer holds. What is unlawful is allowed, even encouraged, and what is lawful is ridiculed or punished. Fakery proliferates and psychopathic behavior thrives. Bizarrely, civility is attacked as white privilege. Truth is spat upon as insults and lies proliferate like viruses. None of these self-designated “revolutionaries” would survive in a widespread lower technology and energy, and high civility civilization that Jensen (and many a doomer) wants. Wiser, more civil civ could have grown out the voracious caterpillar of capitalism that has brought unimagined wealth to common people all around the world, but that option is being foreclosed upon before our eyes.
It takes no skill to throw a rock through a store window. It takes a lot of skill to make even simple glass. Such a civil civilization would require a high level of skills, not only for securing food, local safety, and mostly lower-tech comforts, but also for cooperative problem-solving and non-violent communication. Both are needed for survival once the high tech fabric that covers us all begins to shred. Both could help the salmon.
Sometimes I wonder if the chaos will bring forth another Hitler, just as the chaos and misery of the Weimar Republic brought forth the one we knew not so long ago, and his minions. If the psychopathic chaos-makers wanted to help one rise, this is one effective way. But on the other hand, there is always the quiet terror of Orwell’s 1984. Sneaky drugs, fancy machines, ear on the phone, endless and pointless blather everywhere, ignorance of history, reckless destruction of cultural and political inheritance, endless sloganeering, totality in a 21st century garb, where people are muzzled by masks everywhere for the rest of their lives and never connect with another human being in public, ever again. Groupthink is holy. Free speech is hate speech. Perversion is righteous. Pedophilia is just another lifestyle choice. Und Arbeit macht frei.
And the salmon continue to die.
And the salmon continue to die.
Leaving Babylon 
August 18, 2020 at 7:36 pm
You have put your finger directly on the pulse of things. America is really flailing away at things badly in exceedingly counterproductive ways. Breathtakingly badly. As if the country’s collective behavior wasn’t already bad enough before the pandemic hit, since then it’s like someone hit the “crazy” button bringing out the worst possible responses from nearly every quarter. And the more we flail, the more we exacerbate the problems and dig ourselves in deeper.
The handwriting has been on the wall for over a decade now since the 2008 financial crisis. Decline in the form of the unraveling and slowdown in world trade beginning in earnest last year, along with other economic spasms, had been unfolding along lines I expected prior to the pandemic. But since then, the speed of the train wreck and cars piling up after the pandemic hit has been appalling, even for someone like me who had been tapping his toes wondering if/when things might finally go off the tracks.
Just about anything could have served as the pin to burst the debt-fueled, emperor-has-no-clothes bubble we’ve been living in since 2008. But the pandemic acting as the pin to pop it has been the worst trigger one could imagine in terms of the collective self-destructiveness it has unleashed in reaction to it.
Huge waves of froth from the collective id in the form of raw fear, an irresponsibly hype-driven, almost hysterical media, economic bad moves, political bad moves, Orwellian grabs for power and citizen-tracking surveillance, pinning hopes on a vaccine while almost completely ignoring health-building, which would be the #1 thing focused on in a functionally healthy society. To say nothing of which, past generations would not have reacted so hysterically to the virus in the first place. This discontinuity with the past itself has been disconcerting. As if one were Rip Van Winkle going to sleep one day in relative sanity, and waking up to a new day in a world gone insane.
While it’s obvious the U.S. had become exceedingly complacent, spoiled, financially profligate, physically weak, and mentally unhealthy on the collective level, the sheer breadth and lunacy of the rot and reactiveness set loose has been amazing and frightening to behold. I think of how our country has responded as utterly “anti-Tao” in almost every way, shape, and form.
August 23, 2020 at 2:05 pm
Yup. I think we all knew, when all the 2008 crisis triggered was big bailouts, clearly against the will of the people, and nothing was fixed. Not even going back to status quo ante when banks had to mind their reserves. And banks rather letting houses go empty and fall into disrepair than make some sort of an agreement with the people whom they themselves walked into bad loans. One thing after another.
Then the hysteria around Trump. For 200 years, Americans agreed to a peaceable transition of power. This year your candidate, next year mine. That completely broke down and families were divided over someone who will be in office at most 8 years. Unbelievable. This is not the America I walked into years ago.
The left has turned into shrill lunatics pushing insane policies that destroy whole cities and states, while the republicans sit on their hands and mumble tired shibboleths. Check out this vid about what is happening in Seattle, once a gem of a city.
Seattle is dying
August 26, 2020 at 7:22 pm
What a great illustration of the issues.”‘People’ who refuse to say black is white and red is blue are hounded and ‘cancelled'” perfectly put. The whole paragraph is just brilliant.
It really saddens me to see all of that. I’m fighting but I feel like I’m stuck in quicksand.
August 27, 2020 at 6:11 pm
Welcome, Sam. And thank you. I am kinda stuck too. But it seems to me, mocking the nonsense that is coming at us non-stop may be a path forward. I took a peek at Clusterfuck Nation, since we really are in a clusterfuck of massive proportions, and here is what Kunstler has to say. A chuckle a day keeps the creeps away.
“Could the country even stand another full-on political convention after the Democrats’ nauseating extravaganza last week? The nation is so marinated in agitprop, disinfo, and straight-up mendacity that all the intelligence has been leached out of the population, perhaps even the will to live. A Republican convention complete with the usual showboating might deplete the remaining oxycontin supply across the land as unemployed millions, mulling over rents overdue and unmet car payments, resort to vodka, Xanax, cough syrup, and airplane glue to quell the pain induced by unbridled political bullshit.”
August 27, 2020 at 7:37 pm
Eh… that was depressing more than funny.
August 27, 2020 at 8:34 pm
Well, that’s Kunstler’s acid humor… he was prescient with the clusterfuck meme…