A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [164]
is reduced further by the rates at which arrests are made, charges are filed, convictions are obtained, and so forth, which means convicted offenders represent about one percent of all perpetrators. Now, if your odds of being caught and convicted of rape are basically one in one hundred, you have to be extremely inept to become a convicted rapist. Thus the folks we are normally able to study look fairly pathetic, and often have a fair amount of psychopathology and violence in their own histories. But they're not representative of your ordinary, garden-variety rapist or torturer, or the person who gets recruited to go on an ethnic cleansing spree. We don't know much about these people. The one thing victims say most often is that these people look normal, and that nobody would have believed it about them. That was true even of Nazi war criminals. From a psychiatric point of view, these people didn't look particularly disturbed. In some ways that's the scariest thing of all."
"Given the misogyny, genocide, and ecocide endemic in our culture," I said, "I wonder how much of that normality is only seeming"
"If you're part of a predatory and militaristic culture, then to behave in a predatory and exploitative way is not deviant, per se. Of course there are rules as to who, if you want to use these terms, might be a legitimate victim, a person who may be attacked with impunity. And most perpetrators are exquisitely sensitive to these rules."
I wondered out loud, "Why is our behavior so predatory? What are the common factors among predatory cultures?"
"It's interesting," she responded. "The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday looked at data from over a hundred cultures as to the prevalence of rape, and divided them into high- or low-rape cultures. She found that high-rape cultures are highly militarized and sex-segregated. There is a lot of difference in status between men and women. The care of children is devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high-rape cultures recognize only a male deity rather than a female deity or a couple. When you think about it, that is rather bizarre. It would be an understandable mistake to think women make babies all by themselves, but it's preposterous to think men do that alone. So you've got to have a fairly elaborate and counterintuitive mythmaking machine in order to fabricate a creation myth that recognizes only a male deity. There was another interesting finding, which is that high-rape cultures had recent experiences—meaning in the last few hundred years—of famine or migration. That is to say, they had not reached a stable adaptation to their ecological niche. Sadly enough, when you tally these risk factors, you realize you've pretty much described our culture."
If words alone could bring down our culture, I would write them. If actions by themselves would stop the atrocities, I would commit them. If a change of heart would bring back the salmon, I would change my heart again and again and again.
It is not enough at this point (necessary, as they say, but not sufficient) to merely right ourselves from trauma, to dismantle the walls we've so laboriously and necessarily constructed to constrict our broken hearts, and then to try to pick up the shredded and scattered fragments of our experience to reassemble like a precious vase that won't quite go back together no matter how we try, or better, like the lifeless body of a loved one who is never coming back.
The dog going blind, with whom I traveled in my truck so many years ago, eventually was hit by a train. Focused only on me, her friend, farther along the way, she never knew what hit her but merely tumbled off the tracks into the tall weeds by the side. I ran to her, found her, picked her up and could not believe she was dead