A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [60]
Wars of extermination somehow become Natural as well: the authors conclude that "neither in history nor around the globe today is there evidence of a truly peaceful society." But to make this statement, the authors are forced to ignore scores of peaceful cultures. They must ignore the difference between feuds and raiding parties, forms of ritualized violence where humiliation is the goal, and genocide. These are crucial differences. To ignore the qualitative and quantitative differences between counting coup and, not only using, but having invented something like napalm is to be entirely deaf to any reasonable sense of morality.
Take the Semai, of Malaya, to provide just one example among many: "As long as they have been known to the outside world," one anthropologist who lived with them wrote, "they consistently fled rather than fight, or even run the risk of fighting." The Semai never strike their children, nor strike each other. When they speak in Malay, they translate the verb to hit as to kill. If two people quarrel, the worst they may do is call each other "cockroach," or some other name. The quarrel goes no farther, but is taken to a third party for resolution. The Semai believe that to make another person unhappy is to increase the probability that the other will suffer an accident. This is something they try to avoid under all circumstances. These characteristics have caused many Westerners to label the Semai as "timid," or "weak." The authors of Demonic Males ignore them altogether.
Such obviously selective scholarship in defense of the status quo perplexes me as much as any other manifestation of our culture's destructiveness. The question I keep asking myself—as I watch the Spokesman's editors insist that any concern regarding lead pollution is unnecessary because "there are no human bodies lining the Spokane River," or as the authors of Demonic Males deftly ignore the hundreds of human cultures that are based on cooperation and peacefulness—is this: Are these people evil, or are they stupid? We stumble over ourselves to avoid the truth, to avoid the many grenades that are slowly wobbling across the floor. The answer seems to be that in making ourselves blind we become evil and stupid. We are afraid what it would mean were we to see.
Although the authors state that "patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide," and comes out of men's "evolutionarily derived efforts to control women," it took me only an hour to find a description of the Paliyans, indigenous forest hunters of India, for whom "independence of authority is a treasured right. Neither spouse can order the other, and neither, by virtue of sex or age, is entitled to a greater voice in matters of mutual concern." It took me another fifteen minutes to find that the Bushmen live—or rather used to, before they were civilized—such that "the status of husband and wife are on terms of equality, which precludes any prediction that a husband or wife will follow the lead of the other." And then I read the words of the Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune, who wrote in the seventeenth century that "the Savage tribes . . . cannot chastise a child, nor see one chastised."
"How much trouble this will give us," Le Jeune lamented, "in carrying out our plans for teaching the young!" When Le Jeune upbraided an Indian man for the sexual freedom his wife enjoyed (he was not sure he was the father of her child), the Indian responded, "Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe."
The examples are there, if only we look.
And while it is certainly unfair to