A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [116]
Writing this book is the hardest thing I have ever done, but so long as I allow myself to remain focused on choosing the words precisely, I can keep myself distracted not only from the difficulty but from the feelings. And keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings is the point of so much of what we do, is it not?
This book is as artificial as any other, and is bound by the laws of cultural production. I allow you to know only what I want you to know of what I know. Even I am allowed to know only a small portion of what I know.
I do not know who I am. When my father came into my room, and I went away—poof-—what happened to the part who remained behind? Who is he, and what does he feel? What did he feel? How can I ever make right to him what I put him through by leaving? I know I saved myself, and I do not precisely blame myself, but what of the me I left behind?
I have been splintered into a thousand pieces, and I do not know if I shall ever be whole. I do not even know what wholeness means, and looking around it does not seem that many others do, either.
It should be clear by now that a central belief of our culture—if not the central belief—is that it is not only acceptable but desirable and necessary to bend others to our own will. This belief in the rightness of coercion motivates us not only collectively but individually, not only consciously but subliminally.
Coercion is central to our religion, whether we offer those different from us the immediate choice of Christianity or death, or the more eternal choice of Jesus or damnation.
Coercion is central to our scientific philosophy, whether we speak of Descartes' dream of possessing nature, Bacon's storming of nature's strongholds to make her our slave, the suggestion in Demonic Males that a woman's safest future may be to bond with a violent man, or Dawkins' pathetic description of selfish genes coercing us to coerce others.
Coercion is central to our applied sciences, whether we speak of dammed rivers, "scientific management" of forests, predator "control" projects, or the exploration of the human genome by self-styled "genetic prospectors" seeking to exploit the chromosomal makeup of often-unwilling peoples.
Coercion is central to our economics, whether we speak of the Middle Passage, the modern-day enslavement of one hundred and fifty million children, the forcing of people to enter the wage economy through the removal of realistic options and more broadly the wage slavery that defines capitalism, or the routine use of police and the military to assist the men atop their boxes to accumulate ever-more wealth.
Coercion is central to our legal system, which presents one face to those in power, and a different face to those who fight this power. In the case of the former, coercion is systematized through a body of lawmakers and interpreters which supports and rationalizes the use of force by those in power to gain material possessions or otherwise bend certain others—the powerless, the silenced, the not-fully-human—to the will of the already powerful. Just as my father never beat anyone without good reason, it is more pleasing to the now-silenced consciences of those doing the coercing to arm themselves not just with weapons and claims to virtue but also with a system of legalistic arguments that justify coercion.
The legal system presents a different face to those who infringe upon the right of those in power to use coercion. Thus the crucifixion of Jesus, and of Spartacus. Thus the slaughter of the Anabaptists.