A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [20]
About two weeks ago I received in the mail the Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect. This comprehensive report estimated that in 1993, approximately 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured.
What is the relationship between these numbers and our culturally induced isolation from the natural world and each other, from the social embeddedness in which we evolved?
When I was a child, I sometimes used to lie in bed and look at the ceiling. By softening my gaze, I could cause the spackling above to take form. I saw tin cans, demons, books, knives, flowers, faces. I made up mysteries, which I tried to solve with clues I gath ered from above. It is possible to find patterns where none exist. When Descartes said, "I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false," he was on to something. Each day we are bombarded by so many pieces of information—as I write, there is the sound of the space heater, the black on grey of the computer screen, the plastic of its housing, the pictures of the earth on the wall behind, and below them a pair of newspaper clippings ("Defiant activist defends guerrillas," and "Mother bear charges trains"), the clucking of chickens and chatter of geese outside, the quick movement of a tiny spider on the ceiling, the weight of my clothes, the smell of dust on the back of a cat who just came inside: all these and thousands more in only this one moment. It's never possible to know for certain the "true" source of any given interpretation, the dividing line between our association (i.e., projection) and reality. The question quickly becomes, What is real? It is always possible to consciously or unconsciously "see" almost anything we want. I can look at the ceiling and see an image of the Virgin Mary, or I can look at the ceiling and see that the spackler did a damn good job.
Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian—the mythology resides deep in my bones—and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky.
Blasphemy is more complicated than the simple act of cursing God. It is an attempt to remove our cultural eyeglasses, or at least grind the lenses to make our focus broader, clearer. There are deep strictures against removing these eyeglasses, for without them our culture would fall apart. Question Christianity, damned heathen. Question capitalism, pinko liberal. Question democracy, ungrateful wretch. Question science, just plain stupid. These epithets—blasphemer, commie, ingrate, stupid—need not be spoken aloud. Their invocation actually implies an incomplete enculturation of the subject. Proper enculturation causes the eyeglasses to be undetectable. People believe they are perceiving the world as it is, without the distorting lens of culture: God (with a capital G) does sit upon a heavenly throne;